Money Talking

The Russian economy is reeling from the effects of plummeting oil prices and U.S. led sanctions tied to its aggression in Ukraine. The value of the ruble is plunging despite efforts by the Russian central bank to stabilize the currency. The U.S. publicly accused North Korea of being behind the cyber attack of Sony Pictures that resulted in hundreds of embarrassing leaked emails and the cancellation of the release of The Interview. Turns out, North Korea was not amused by a plot line that contemplates the assassination of its leader, Kim Jong-un. And finally, Cuba! In a historic move, President Obama announced the restoration of diplomatic ties after a 50-year embargo. It took Washington and the rest of the country by surprise.  Russia, North Korea and Cuba – three Cold War-era adversaries dominating the news cycle exactly 25 years after the Berlin Wall fell. This week, Joe Nocera of The New York Times and Rana Froohar of Time magazine join Charlie Herman, host of Money Talking, to discuss what's at stake for the U.S. 

It's never been easier to be productive. Giant leaps in technology have given us tools and gadgets that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. They keep us on time and on point with laser-like focus on our objectives. Our lives run with enough precision to impress a Swiss watchmaker.  But you're shaking your head. That's not you? Okay, it's not me either. That rosy scenario is one of the real ironies of the age we live in. It's true that we have the tools to run things efficiently, but so often if feels like they've overwhelmed us. Technology puts us just one blinking, unread message away from everybody who wants us for something whenever they want it. And that last part is critical. Too often, our productivity is sabotaged by the needs of others – especially at the office. "The reason that that memo doesn't get finished or you don't work on the long-term, important project," said Dorie Clark, "is that you're so constantly responding to stimuli that you can't think for the hour or two that you need to get it done." Clark is a business professor at Duke University and author of the Harvard Business Review article, "Stop People from Wasting Your Time." "We have to try to impose a structure so that they're more respectful of our time," she said, referring to our colleagues. And there are few things we can do to take back control of our day and our productivity. First, insist on an agenda for all meetings. Too often people schedule meetings without a clear sense of what they want to accomplish. The sessions drift from the original purpose and eat away at our time. Second, limit the number of times you check email throughout the day. There is nothing as oppressive as an overactive inbox. Clark suggests only checking email in a few discrete blocks of time and dealing with everything at once.  And finally, remember your own power at work.  "We don't really recognize that we have agency," said Clark. The habits of our colleagues don't have to be our habits. Take control of your time and manage it to maximize productivity.  "The most important thing to remember is that it's about prioritization," said Clark. There are times when something truly critical warrants an interruption. "So the reason we limit the trivial stuff is to make room for what's really important and most meaningful in our lives." Listen to the complete interview with Clark above or subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button on the right.

Prosecuting insider trading cases just got a lot harder after an appeals court this week overturned the convictions of two former hedge fund traders. The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the circuit judge provided “erroneous” jury instructions and that prosecutors provided insufficient evidence for a guilty verdict in the trial of Todd Newman and Anthony Chiasson. Both were convicted in 2012. It’s a blow for U.S. Attorney Preet Bahrara who had racked up 89 insider trading convictions. The ruling could call into doubt previous verdicts as well as future prosecutions of insider trading. “Today’s decision by the Court of Appeals interprets the securities laws in a way that will limit the ability to prosecute people who trade on leaked inside information,” said Bahrara in a statement. This week on Money Talking, what the decision means for the future of prosecuting behavior on Wall Street. And then the car hailing service Uber: Sued in California; sued in Portland; banned in parts of India; ordered to cease operations in Spain and Thailand. But users (and investors) still love it. Can regulators and elected officials put the brakes on Uber? Looking ahead, the dramatic fall in oil prices and the "hack from hell."

Lugging groceries around this pedestrian city is a feature of New York living. When Fresh Direct and others began offering home delivery, residents embraced them with enthusiasm, even when frustrated by the extra cost and narrower selection. But now, some new players want to get in on the action. Amazon doesn't just want to sell New Yorkers all the gifts on their holiday lists. It also wants to sell the milk and cookies for Santa. Long the purveyor of practically everything, Amazon wants to widen its offerings to include fresh produce – milk, cheese and eggs – delivered right to your door. Or, for residents of Brooklyn (where the company is currently delivering) kale, quinoa and gluten-free bread. But other companies are also gearing up to compete with Fresh Direct. Fairway has partnered with Instacart to offer grocery delivery. Boxed.com sells and delivers bulk dry goods. And Google, where consumers search for nutrition facts and recipes, is joining the fray with its new Google Express same day service. Reporter Sally Herships experimented with a few of these services for WNYC's Money Talking. Amazon delivered her items as promised with only a few raspberries squished. When she tried to order from Google, it was a complete fail as the world's biggest search engine currently doesn't offer delivery to her Brooklyn neighborhood. While this holiday season may be a food fight for online retailers in New York, hopefully for the rest of us, it will promise a few days away from the office. Continuing a series with the Harvard Business Review looking at how to survive the workplace, Charlie Herman, host of Money Talking, talks with Peter Bregman, author of the Harvard Business Review article, "What to Do on Your First Day Back from Vacation." Bregman says, don't get distracted by the small, anxiety-inducing tasks like dealing with email buildup. "Before you do anything, you should pause for a moment and think about what is it that is most important for the organization to accomplish," said Bregman. "You want to reconnect with the vision of the organization. You want to reconnect with the strategy." Returning from vacation can be overwhelming and Bregman has worked out a radical strategy for maintaining those good vacation feelings. "Take lunch or pause for an hour – a whole hour – and maybe have lunch with someone you like and have a conversation with them," he said. "That's one way of bringing that vacation feeling back. It slows you down enough to remind you that you're a human being."

There are few moments as euphoric as those right after the last conference call, the final meeting or that instant when you flip the switch on your email to automatically tell the world that from this point forward, you are on vacation. You're gone. Off to the beach, the slopes, the national parks or a foreign cities. At the very least, it's a few extra days with family and friends while the rest of the world is stuck in the grind. Whether it's a week or a just a few days, the point is to breathe slower, sleep later and leave the stress of the office behind.  But then it ends. It always ends. And the path back can be ugly. All those good vacation vibes are wiped out in the few short seconds it takes to scroll past the first hundred emails; our anxiety rises as we page down and start imagining the monumental effort ahead. But maybe we can take more control over the transition back to work.   Peter Bregman is the CEO of Bregman Partners, a leadership consulting firm and author of the Harvard Business Review article, "What to Do on Your First Day Back from Vacation."   "Before you do anything, you should pause for a moment and think about what is it that is most important for the organization to accomplish," Bregman tells Charlie Herman, host of WNYC's Money Talking. "You want to reconnect with the vision of the organization. You want to reconnect with the strategy."  In other words, don't get lost in the small, transactional aspects of the job, like your inbox. It's only going to recreate the anxiety you went on vacation to escape. You'll get to those eventually.  Bregman says that for him, a successful transition back to work starts with "knowing what will move the business forward and me forward and then filtering everything that I do through that lens."

It's said that to get a sense of someone's priorities, take a look at their reading list. And if business books are what you prefer to read, then, at least according to Amazon, this year’s list of the best business titles should offer insight. "There's a definite Silicon Valley angle that comes out," said Chris Schluep, the business and investing editor at Amazon.com, tells Charlie Herman, host of WNYC’s Money Talking. Schluep is one of six editors at Amazon responsible for picking the 100 best books across all categories. Their “best of the year" lists are editorially curated without concern for how well the books sold, how much traffic they generated or how customers rated them.  On Schluep’s list, it's easy to spot the innovation thread: there’s The Innovators by Walter Isaacson, Flash Boys by Michael Lewis and Zero to One by Peter Thiel. The context might be technology, finance or entrepreneurship, but all these books are about thinking differently, thinking creatively, breaking the mold of established wisdom.  "Two years ago, I thought every book was about the brain," said Schluep. "And now it's more about the mind and how people think." But novel ideas don't substitute for good storytelling. Flash Boys is his number one business book of the year because Lewis spins a fascinating tale with strong characters who work the obscure field of high-frequency trading. People like advice, but they love stories. Another book on Schluep’s list (and several other compilations as well) is Capital, the door-stopping economics tome from Thomas Piketty. The densely packed book got a lot of attention for the author's views on income inequality and his bold call for government intervention. But Schluep said, "the first two-thirds are set for non-business minds.” Writing a business book for a wider audience is a big factor in the selection process at Amazon. At the other end of the spectrum is #Girlboss by Sophia Amoruso, founder of the Nasty Gal fashion retailer. "It's a rags to riches story," said Schluep. "She's trying to speak to people – especially women – to act and follow their gut, but also to get very serious. And if you don't get serious, you're really not going anywhere."  Then, Money Talking talks to one of the authors on the list: Peter Thiel, best known as a founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. In 2012, he gave a series of lectures at Stanford, which he later refined and published in Zero to One. Still a prominent venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, Thiel's thoughts on innovation, disruption and capitalism veer away from the establishment in a big way. "Peter Thiel's book was all about how competition is for losers," said Schluep. ...

Republicans will control both houses of Congress starting this January. But before that happens, the current Congress has some unfinished business. One of those issues is deciding whether or not to extend the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, or TRIA. Passed shortly after the attacks on September 11, 2001, it provided a federal guarantee to cover losses sustained from a terrorist attack once they exceed certain thresholds.  The original intent of the program was to give insurance companies time to develop pricing models that accurately assess the risk of a terrorist attack. Over time, the program would wind down as the burden shifted back to insurers. But TRIA was extended twice – in 2005 and 2007 – and is now set to expire again on December 31.  The Senate passed a reauthorization bill 96-3 last summer to keep the program largely intact. But House Financial Services Chairman, Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican supports a different version that raises the cost threshold before the government intervenes. This week on Money Talking, Charlie Herman talks with WNYC's Ilya Marritz who's been covering the fight in Congress about why the stakes are so high for the real estate industry in New York. After that, a conversation about annual employee reviews. Nikki Waller from The Wall Street Journal discusses new approaches companies are taking to evaluate employee performance. And Sheila Heen, a contributor to the Harvard Business Review and co-author of Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well, examines how employees can – and should – take more control over the feedback process. "One way to get coaching is to ask a very specific question,” said Heen. “'What’s one thing I’m doing or failing to do that you think is getting in my way or that you think would improve things?'"

President Obama put forth a plan this week calling on the Federal Communications Commission to adopt strict rules protecting net neutrality. The agency has been working to balance the interests of technology companies who create and transmit information over the Internet with the concerns of cable operators and equipment makers that build and maintain the infrastructure that carries that information. Tech companies, like Google and Netflix, generally oppose proposals that allow broadband companies to charge different rates for faster speeds. The president is pushing for rules that would reclassify broadband operators and permit more regulation, bringing them in line with how phone companies have been regulated for decades. That would prevent preferential pricing and eliminate the so-called "fast" and "slow" lanes." Not surprisingly, broadband providers want a freer hand to negotiate pricing and say net neutrality, as it's known, will stifle innovation and curb investment in better infrastructure. This week on Money Talking, Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University and the man who coined the term "net neutrality" discusses why the outcome of this debate has the potential to fundamentally affect the way the Internet works, and by default, the way we work.  Then, a look at encouraging curiosity and tough questions with Genevieve Bell, Intel's Director of User Experience Research. An anthropologist by training, Bell represents a growing trend of companies looking to social scientists to help predict what people will want in the future. 

An MBA is no longer the only path to a successful Fortune 500 career. And while a business degree still goes a long way, majoring in the social sciences may offer more than a life in academia. Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist who, for the last 16 years, has been the in-house big thinker at Intel Corporation. Her official title is "Vice President and Intel Fellow at Intel Labs and Director of User Experience Research." Translation? "We spend our time in people's homes all over the world getting a sense of what makes them tick, what they care about frustrates them. And using those insights to drive next generation technology development." It turns out, social scientists are a good fit for this type of work. Intel has a research and development team who are paid to push the limits of chip technology. But if they can't get a sense of the devices those chips will power in the future, all that work could end up off the mark. Bell's job is to ask bigger questions about how and where technology will integrate into people's lives in world where we have the ability to put in everywhere.  One of the challenges for big companies, Bell says, is "how do you keep refreshing your imagination so that you find and pay attention to the things that don't look like the future you imagined. And how do you maintain curiosity at a company level?" She has no shortage of curiosity herself. She recently gave a presentation at the New York City Media Lab about the history of robots and the future of automation. (Check it out, if only to find out the origin of the word "robot." Some hints: Eastern Europe, Broadway, Marxism and Spencer Tracy.) As companies look to find new ways of thinking, graduates with degrees in the humanities might be just what corporate America is looking for.

California recently issued permits to Google, Audi and Mercedes to test 29 self-driving vehicles on any public road in the state. These cars are self-driving, but not driver-less. Licensed drivers approved by California will be in the cars at all times as backups in case the technology fails. This may look like the beginning of a new world of driving, but are they safer? After all, these vehicles are still just machines run by computers. This week on Money Talking, host Charlie Herman talks with Cardiff Garcia from the Financial Times and Will Knight from the MIT Technology Review to get a reality check about self-driving cars and what it means for the economy, the auto industry and for us.

It's earnings season again, that quarterly ritual when investors anxiously wait for companies to report their financial results. In the wave of new regulations passed during the Great Depression, the government decided that public companies owed their investors an update every three months. But in the 80 years since, public filings have gotten longer and more complex, putting a strain on management. Writers with the Lex column at the Financial Times think these frequent filings might not be worth it, that they lead to short-term thinking by companies and put too much focus on stock prices instead of the long-term health of companies. This week on Money Talking, Sujeet Indap, a columnist at the Financial Times, makes the case that U.S. investors might be better off if companies had fewer filing requirements and provided information when it really matters. Then picking up with contributors at the Harvard Business Review about the challenges that vex us in today's workplace. This week, Jeff Weiss, a professor at West Point and Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, reviews how "Negotiating is Not the Same as Haggling:" turns out negotiating for a raise is not the same as buying a car.

Global markets have been on a wild ride for the past two weeks as investors act on fears of a slowdown in global growth. The IMF recently lowered its global economic growth forecast as there are new concerns rise that Europe is sliding closer towards another recession. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve later this month is scheduled to end its bond buying program that helped stimulate U.S. economic growth. This week on Money Talking, regular contributors Rana Foroohar of Time magazine and Joe Nocera of The New York Times discuss why investors are so spooked, the impact of low oil prices and how Ebola is helping to fuel the jitters. Even in the U.S., where the economic recovery appears to be on solid ground, markets remain volatile. 

It's the one year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act and millions of people have health insurance for the first time. Premiums haven't spiked as some predicted, but more than 30 million people are still uninsured. But as the 2015 enrollment period approaches, some employers are scaling back benefits, offering plans with higher deductibles and in some cases, forcing employees into the marketplace to find coverage. This week on Money Talking, regular contributors Rana Foroohar of Time magazine and Joe Nocera of The New York Times discuss Wal-Mart's recent decision to stop covering part-time employees who work less than 30 hours per week and whether the law has lived up to its promises or just confirmed the suspicions of its critics. 

New reporting by The New York Times suggests that the U.S. government could have kept Lehman Brothers out of bankruptcy six years ago. The Lehman bankruptcy marked the moment when a rocky, unstable economy turned into a full-blown financial crisis. This week on Money Talking, regular contributors Rana Foroohar of Time magazine and Joe Nocera of The New York Times examine how the crisis might have been different if Lehman was indeed, too big to fail. Also, a look at whether the New York Federal Reserve is too close to the banks it's charged with regulating. "This American Life" and ProPublica reported on secret tapes recorded by a Fed employee showing the central bank's unwillingness to aggressively confront questionable practices at Goldman Sachs. 

A week of climate change marches, meetings, speeches and pledges in New York City is coming to an end. World leaders came for the U.N. Climate Summit and regular folks joined the People's Climate March on Sunday. Business executives also gathered and made pledges to fight climate change. This week on Money Talking, regular contributors Rana Foroohar of Time magazine and Joe Nocera of the New York Times examine what corporate leaders around the globe are doing to reduce emissions and embrace sustainability in their businesses and whether they are doing enough. Also, a look at the movement to get university endowments, pensions and individuals to divest from fossil fuel companies - how could it affect the climate change? According to Arabella Advisors, various entities have already committed to divest over $50 billion in assets from fossil fuel companies.