03Dec 
Haruka Nishimatsu
There was an amazing interview on CNN recently with Haruka Nishimatsu, the CEO of JAL, Japan Airlines. The interview could have been a primer on how to be an ethical CEO who cares about his people and his company more than he cares about his own compensation. According to the report, when JAL slashed jobs and asked older employees to retire early, Nishimatsu cut every single one of his corporate perks, and then for three years running slashed his own pay. In 2007, he made about $90,000 U.S., less than what his pilots earn. In Japan, says Nishimatsu, there’s less of a pay gap between the top and the bottom. “We in Japan learned during the bubble economy that businesses who pursue money first fail. The business world has lost sight of this basic tenet of business ethics.”
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02Dec In the 1950’s, Solomon Asch, conducted a series of experiments designed to understand the phenomenon we know as conformity. In his experiments, a group of participants were seated around a table and asked to examine a series of vertical lines. They were then asked to tell the group which vertical line, A, B, or C, matched the test line. The vertical line series looked very similar to these:
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01Dec 
If you don’t sleep as well at The Benjamin Hotel as you do at home, Andy Labetti, General Manager for The Benjamin, will give you a free night’s stay. A good night’s sleep is non-negotiable. The Benjamin’s ‘Sleep Guarantee’ ensures that everyone who stays at the hotel walks away well rested or gets their money back. If a guest is dissatisfied with his or her sleep at The Benjamin, all they need to do is contact the front desk, and the hotel will refund the cost of their night’s stay.
And those aren’t just some words slapped on a hotel brochure. The Benjamin has gone to extraordinary lengths to back up the guarantee of a good night’s rest in New York, “the city that never sleeps.”
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25Nov When you think about startup companies what comes to mind? Vision, focused vision. Energy, lots of energy. Small teams. No rules. The Beginner’s Mind. The Art of the Possible. Now, think about the huge, established, multinationals. What images do they conjure up? Bureaucracy. Heavy process. Big teams. Tried and true. Conservative. Dull. Perhaps you came up with other descriptors, but that’s what I think of when I think about startups versus big established companies.
I believe that the qualities that I described above for startups are what make many of them successful. And almost more importantly, I think it’s what makes them fun and exciting to work at. So many startups have charismatic leaders who have a really clear and focused vision for the company. They need to; they can’t afford to waste time working on things that don’t get them to their goal quickly. And energy. There is is so much energy at a startup because everyone is really committed to making this thing work. They wouldn’t be there otherwise. Many talented people who work at startups could easily work at a big corporation making better salaries. But there is a certain energy at startups that really bright people seem to thrive on. Maybe it’s the thrill of survival?
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