Technology Upends Another Industry: Homebuilding

These new efficiencies have led to what economists call "labor displacement," which is taking place around the country. One business in Rockville, Md., is doing the same amount of work with half its original staff. Two things are noticeably absent from the offices of Mid-Atlantic Builders: people and paper. John Lavery, vice president of sales for the residential builder, keeps a relic in his office of the company's recent past: a binder heftier than a phone book that's filled with sketches and floor plan options of all the homes the company builds.

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An Airline Buys an Oil Refinery; What Took Them So Long?

Fascinating article in today’s Wall Street Journal, by Susan Carey and Angel Gonzelez: “Delta to Buy Refinery in Effort to Lower Jet-Fuel Costs.” Coupled with the news of Microsoft bankrolling B&N’s Nook business, the Delta deal shows how far and fast existing business models are shifting, and how vertical integration continues to not be dead.

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The Rent-A-Car Jocks Who Made Enterprise #1

Unusual hiring and promotion practices drive much of the company's hustle and rapid growth. Virtually every Enterprise employee is a college graduate; in a unionized, labor-intensive industry that seeks to keep wages low, that's unusual enough. But there's more. Hang around Enterprise people long enough, and you'll notice that despite their informal exteriors, most seem to have the competitive, aggressive air of an ex-athlete. It's no accident. Brainy introverts need not apply, says Donald L. Ross, the company's chief operating officer. "We hire from the half of the college class that makes the upper half possible," he adds wryly. "We want athletes, fraternity types--especially fraternity presidents and social directors. People people."

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Hiring hotties: When can an employer prefer the attractive over the homely?

MARYLOU’S COFFEE, a chain in New England, is renowned less for its coffee than for its staff. In tight pink T-shirts and short shorts, they tend to be young, pretty and female. But is that illegal? In May the press reported that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was investigating Marylou’s for hiring discrimination. (The EEOC cannot confirm any investigation at this point.) Worse, the papers said the investigation comes without anyone having complained about being turned down for a job. Op-ed writers pounced. A writer at the Boston Herald proclaimed: “Yes, Marylou’s ‘discriminates’. Every employer ‘discriminates’. If they didn’t, I’d be working as a Chippendales dancer.”

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Who's Starting America's New Businesses? And Why?

Here’s what Jack had to say about the current entrepreneurial trend, based on calculations and information he’s gathered from the Kauffman Foundation. As of March 2011, there are an average of 320 new businesses launched every month, for every 100,000 U.S. adults.

That equates to 543,000 new U.S. companies every month. (We can’t annualize this number by simply multiplying by 12, Kauffman notes, since some entrepreneurs are in and out of multiple businesses during that time. However, multiple estimates put the total number of U.S. entrepreneurs at 11.5 million, in sum.)

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The Revolution Won't Be Televised; It Will Be Instagrammed

The boom in TV sales in the 1950s and '60s created a wave of innovation in visual storytelling. It gave rise to the now ubiquitous 30-second spot.

Today a similar phenomenon is underway. Visual storytelling is in renaissance -- but with a twist. Photography, rather than video, is fast becoming the lingua franca of a more global, mobile and social society.

This will have a significant impact on brand marketers, but perhaps in some not-so-obvious ways. More on this in a bit.

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Re:Re:Fw:Re: Workers Spend 650 Hours a Year on Email

Unless you happen to get some sort of obsessive compulsive satisfaction from keeping your inbox in shipshape -- and hey, if you do, more power to ya -- dealing with email has got to be one of the most deadening aspects of any office job. And if the tedium of Outlook management wasn't already dreadful enough, consider this: There's a good chance you spend more than a quarter of each week reading and answering those emails.

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