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I traveled MILES to reach this place. The PATH I took was winding and mysterious. But now I am enrolled in this class, and I will give it my all. No matter how much SWEAT and tears it takes, I will FINISH this RACE.

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Module 1: The Founder of Management Theory

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Module 1: The Founder of Management Theory

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This book is an interesting compilation of articles about the ideas of the founder of management theory, Henri Fayol.

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This presentation constitutes a good introduction to the classical management theory.

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It is funny seeing the role of a manager being compared to that of Moses parting the Red Sea.

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I think this is a good graphical representation of the succession of stages in a career.

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Here is a nice graphical representation of the main reasons for sustainability.

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Module 2: Unethical Behavior at Facebook

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Module 2: Unethical Behavior at Facebook

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This investigation reveals unethical behavior in how Facebook dealt with the accusations that it helped spread misinformation during the 2016 presidential campaign.

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Facebook has gone on the attack as one scandal after another - Russian meddling, data sharing, hate speech - has led to a congressional and consumer backlash. Credit Credit Tom Brenner for The New York Times

Sheryl Sandberg was seething.

Inside Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 American election. Congressional and federal investigators were closing in on evidence that would implicate the company.

But it wasn't the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Ms. Sandberg. It was the social network's security chief, Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation. Mr. Stamos's briefing had prompted a humiliating boardroom interrogation of Ms. Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, and her billionaire boss. She appeared to regard the admission as a betrayal.
[Sheryl Sandberg is said to have asked Facebook employees to examine George Soros's finances after he criticized the social media giant.]
"You threw us under the bus!" she yelled at Mr. Stamos, according to people who were present.

The clash that day would set off a reckoning - for Mr. Zuckerberg, for Ms. Sandberg and for the business they had built together. In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising business and daily life around the world. Along the way, Facebook accumulated one of the largest-ever repositories of personal data, a treasure trove of photos, messages and likes that propelled the company into the Fortune 500.

[Here's how Facebook failed to police how its partners handled user data.]
But as evidence accumulated that Facebook's power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

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When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed - as the company's stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash - Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook's critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

In Washington, allies of Facebook, including Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, intervened on its behalf. And Ms. Sandberg wooed or cajoled hostile lawmakers, while trying to dispel Facebook's reputation as a bastion of Bay Area liberalism.

This account of how Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg navigated Facebook's cascading crises, much of which has not been previously reported, is based on interviews with more than 50 people. They include current and former Facebook executives and other employees, lawmakers and government officials, lobbyists and congressional staff members. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, were not authorized to speak to reporters or feared retaliation.

Facebook declined to make Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg available for comment. In a statement, a spokesman acknowledged that Facebook had been slow to address its challenges but had since made progress fixing the platform.

"This has been a tough time at Facebook and our entire management team has been focused on tackling the issues we face," the statement said. "While these are hard problems we are working hard to ensure that people find our products useful and that we protect our community from bad actors."

Even so, trust in the social network has sunk, while its pell-mell growth has slowed. Regulators and law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe are investigating Facebook's conduct with Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that worked with Mr. Trump's 2016 campaign, opening up the company to fines and other liability. Both the Trump administration and lawmakers have begun crafting proposals for a national privacy law, setting up a yearslong struggle over the future of Facebook's data-hungry business model.
[Despite a turbulent two years, here's why almost no one in tech thinks Mark Zuckerberg should step down from the company he built.]
"We failed to look and try to imagine what was hiding behind corners," Elliot Schrage, former vice president for global communications, marketing and public policy at Facebook, said in an interview.

Mr. Zuckerberg, 34, and Ms. Sandberg, 49, remain at the company's helm, while Mr. Stamos and other high-profile executives have left after disputes over Facebook's priorities. Mr. Zuckerberg, who controls the social network with 60 percent of the voting shares and who approved many of its directors, has been asked repeatedly in the last year whether he should step down as chief executive.

His answer each time: a resounding "No."

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Three years ago, Mr. Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004 while attending Harvard, was celebrated for the company's extraordinary success. Ms. Sandberg, a former Clinton administration official and Google veteran, had become a feminist icon with the publication of her empowerment manifesto, "Lean In," in 2013.

Like other technology executives, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg cast their company as a force for social good. Facebook's lofty aims were emblazoned even on securities filings: " Our mission is to make the world more open and connected."

But as Facebook grew, so did the hate speech, bullying and other toxic content on the platform. When researchers and activists in Myanmar, India, Germany and elsewhere warned that Facebook had become an instrument of government propaganda and ethnic cleansing, the company largely ignored them. Facebook had positioned itself as a platform, not a publisher. Taking responsibility for what users posted, or acting to censor it, was expensive and complicated. Many Facebook executives worried that any such efforts would backfire.

Then Donald J. Trump ran for president. He described Muslim immigrants and refugees as a danger to America, and in December 2015 posted a statement on Facebook calling for a "total and complete shutdown" on Muslims entering the United States. Mr. Trump's call to arms - widely condemned by Democrats and some prominent Republicans - was shared more than 15,000 times on Facebook, an illustration of the site's power to spread racist sentiment.

Mr. Zuckerberg, who had helped found a nonprofit dedicated to immigration reform, was appalled, said employees who spoke to him or were familiar with the conversation. He asked Ms. Sandberg and other executives if Mr. Trump had violated Facebook's terms of service.

The question was unusual. Mr. Zuckerberg typically focused on broader technology issues; politics was Ms. Sandberg's domain. In 2010, Ms. Sandberg, a Democrat, had recruited a friend and fellow Clinton alum, Marne Levine, as Facebook's chief Washington representative. A year later, after Republicans seized control of the House, Ms. Sandberg installed another friend, a well-connected Republican: Joel Kaplan, who had attended Harvard with Ms. Sandberg and later served in the George W. Bush administration.

Some at Facebook viewed Mr. Trump's 2015 attack on Muslims as an opportunity to finally take a stand against the hate speech coursing through its platform. But Ms. Sandberg, who was edging back to work after the death of her husband several months earlier, delegated the matter to Mr. Schrage and Monika Bickert, a former prosecutor whom Ms. Sandberg had recruited as the company's head of global policy management. Ms. Sandberg also turned to the Washington office - particularly to Mr. Kaplan, said people who participated in or were briefed on the discussions.

In video conference calls between the Silicon Valley headquarters and Washington, the three officials construed their task narrowly. They parsed the company's terms of service to see if the post, or Mr. Trump's account, violated Facebook's rules.

Mr. Kaplan argued that Mr. Trump was an important public figure and that shutting down his account or removing the statement could be seen as obstructing free speech, said three employees who knew of the discussions. He said it could also stoke a conservative backlash.

"Don't poke the bear," Mr. Kaplan warned.

Mr. Zuckerberg did not participate in the debate. Ms. Sandberg attended some of the video meetings but rarely spoke.

Mr. Schrage concluded that Mr. Trump's language had not violated Facebook's rules and that the candidate's views had public value. "We were trying to make a decision based on all the legal and technical evidence before us," he said in an interview.

In the end, Mr. Trump's statement and account remained on the site. When Mr. Trump won election the next fall, giving Republicans control of the White House as well as Congress, Mr. Kaplan was empowered to plan accordingly. The company hired a former aide to Mr. Trump's new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, along with lobbying firms linked to Republican lawmakers who had jurisdiction over internet companies.

But inside Facebook, new troubles were brewing.

In the final months of Mr. Trump's presidential campaign, Russian agents escalated a yearlong effort to hack and harass his Democratic opponents, culminating in the release of thousands of emails stolen from prominent Democrats and party officials.

Facebook had said nothing publicly about any problems on its own platform. But in the spring of 2016, a company expert on Russian cyberwarfare spotted something worrisome. He reached out to his boss, Mr. Stamos.

Mr. Stamos's team discovered that Russian hackers appeared to be probing Facebook accounts for people connected to the presidential campaigns, said two employees. Months later, as Mr. Trump battled Hillary Clinton in the general election, the team also found Facebook accounts linked to Russian hackers who were messaging journalists to share information from the stolen emails.

Mr. Stamos, 39, told Colin Stretch, Facebook's general counsel, about the findings, said two people involved in the conversations. At the time, Facebook had no policy on disinformation or any resources dedicated to searching for it.

Mr. Stamos, acting on his own, then directed a team to scrutinize the extent of Russian activity on Facebook. In December 2016, after Mr. Zuckerberg publicly scoffed at the idea that fake news on Facebook had helped elect Mr. Trump, Mr. Stamos - alarmed that the company's chief executive seemed unaware of his team's findings - met with Mr. Zuckerberg, Ms. Sandberg and other top Facebook leaders.

Ms. Sandberg was angry. Looking into the Russian activity without approval, she said, had left the company exposed legally. Other executives asked Mr. Stamos why they had not been told sooner.

Still, Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg decided to expand on Mr. Stamos's work, creating a group called Project P, for "propaganda," to study false news on the site, according to people involved in the discussions. By January 2017, the group knew that Mr. Stamos's original team had only scratched the surface of Russian activity on Facebook, and pressed to issue a public paper about their findings.

But Mr. Kaplan and other Facebook executives objected. Washington was already reeling from an official finding by American intelligence agencies that Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, had personally ordered an influence campaign aimed at helping elect Mr. Trump.

If Facebook implicated Russia further, Mr. Kaplan said, Republicans would accuse the company of siding with Democrats. And if Facebook pulled down the Russians' fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived: His own mother-in-law, Mr. Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls.

Ms. Sandberg sided with Mr. Kaplan, recalled four people involved. Mr. Zuckerberg - who spent much of 2017 on a national "listening tour," feeding cows in Wisconsin and eating dinner with Somali refugees in Minnesota - did not participate in the conversations about the public paper. When it waspublished that April, the word "Russia" never appeared.

Ms. Sandberg's subordinates took a similar approach in Washington, where the Senate had begun pursuing its own investigation, led by Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican, and Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat. Throughout the spring and summer of 2017, Facebook officials repeatedly played down Senate investigators' concerns about the company, while publicly claiming there had been no Russian effort of any significance on Facebook.

But inside the company, employees were tracing more ads, pages and groups back to Russia. That June, a Times reporter provided Facebook a list of accounts with suspected ties to Russia, seeking more information on their provenance. By August 2017, Facebook executives concluded that the situation had become what one called a "five-alarm fire," said a person familiar with the discussions.

Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg agreed to go public with some findings, and laid plans to release a blog post on Sept. 6, 2017, the day of the company's quarterly board meeting.

After Mr. Stamos and his team drafted the post, however, Ms. Sandberg and her deputies insisted it be less specific. She and Mr. Zuckerberg also asked Mr. Stamos and Mr. Stretch to brief the board's audit committee, chaired by Erskine Bowles, the patrician investor and White House veteran.

Mr. Stretch and Mr. Stamos went into more detail with the audit committee than planned, warning that Facebook was likely to find even more evidence of Russian interference.

The disclosures set off Mr. Bowles, who after years in Washington could anticipate how lawmakers might react. He grilled the two men, occasionally cursing, on how Facebook had allowed itself to become a tool for Russian interference. He demanded to know why it had taken so long to uncover the activity, and why Facebook directors were only now being told.

When the full board gathered later that day at a room at the company's headquarters reserved for sensitive meetings, Mr. Bowles pelted questions at Facebook's founder and second-in-command. Ms. Sandberg, visibly unsettled, apologized. Mr. Zuckerberg, stone-faced, whirred through technical fixes, said three people who attended or were briefed on the proceedings.

Later that day, the company's abbreviated blog post went up. It said little about fake accounts or the organic posts created by Russian trolls that had gone viral on Facebook, disclosing only that Russian agents had spent roughly $100,000 - a relatively tiny sum - on approximately 3,000 ads.

Just one day after the company's carefully sculpted admission, The Times published an investigation of further Russian activity on Facebook, showing how Russian intelligence had used fake accounts to promote emails stolen from the Democratic Party and prominent Washington figures.

The combined revelations infuriated Democrats, finally fracturing the political consensus that had protected Facebook and other big tech companies from Beltway interference. Republicans, already concerned that the platform was censoring conservative views, accused Facebook of fueling what they claimed were meritless conspiracy charges against Mr. Trump and Russia. Democrats, long allied with Silicon Valley on issues including immigration and gay rights, now blamed Mr. Trump's win partly on Facebook's tolerance for fraud and disinformation.

After stalling for weeks, Facebook eventually agreed to hand over the Russian posts to Congress. Twice in October 2017, Facebook was forced to revise its public statements, finally acknowledging that close to 126 million people had seen the Russian posts.

The same month, Mr. Warner and Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat, introduced legislation to compel Facebook and other internet firms to disclose who bought political ads on their sites - a significant expansion of federal regulation over tech companies.

"It's time for Facebook to let all of us see the ads bought by Russians *and paid for in Rubles* during the last election," Ms. Klobuchar wrote on her own Facebook page.

Facebook girded for battle. Days after the bill was unveiled, Facebook hired Mr. Warner's former chief of staff, Luke Albee, to lobby on it. Mr. Kaplan's team took a larger role in managing the company's Washington response, routinely reviewing Facebook news releases for words or phrases that might rile conservatives.

Ms. Sandberg also reached out to Ms. Klobuchar. She had been friendly with the senator, who is featured on the website for Lean In, Ms. Sandberg's empowerment initiative. Ms. Sandberg had contributed a blurb to Ms. Klobuchar's 2015 memoir, and the senator's chief of staff had previously worked at Ms. Sandberg's charitable foundation.

But in a tense conversation shortly after the ad legislation was introduced, Ms. Sandberg complained about Ms. Klobuchar's attacks on the company, said a person who was briefed on the call. Ms. Klobuchar did not back down on her legislation. But she dialed down her criticism in at least one venue important to the company: After blasting Facebook repeatedly that fall on her own Facebook page, Ms. Klobuchar hardly mentioned the company in posts between November and February.

A spokesman for Ms. Klobuchar said in a statement that Facebook's lobbying had not lessened her commitment to holding the company accountable. "Facebook was pushing to exclude issue ads from the Honest Ads Act, and Senator Klobuchar strenuously disagreed and refused to change the bill," he said.

In October 2017, Facebook also expanded its work with a Washington-based consultant, Definers Public Affairs, that had originally been hired to monitor press coverage of the company. Founded by veterans of Republican presidential politics, Definers specialized in applying political campaign tactics to corporate public relations - an approach long employed in Washington by big telecommunications firms and activist hedge fund managers, but less common in tech.

Definers had established a Silicon Valley outpost earlier that year, led by Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush who preached the virtues of campaign-style opposition research. For tech firms, he argued in one interview, a goal should be to "have positive content pushed out about your company and negative content that's being pushed out about your competitor."

Facebook quickly adopted that strategy. In November 2017, the social network came out in favor of a bill called the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, which made internet companies responsible for sex trafficking ads on their sites.

Google and others had fought the bill for months, worrying it would set a cumbersome precedent. But the sex trafficking bill was championed by Senator John Thune, a Republican of South Dakota who had pummeled Facebook over accusations that it censored conservative content, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and senior commerce committee member who was a frequent critic of Facebook.

Facebook broke ranks with other tech companies, hoping the move would help repair relations on both sides of the aisle, said two congressional staffers and three tech industry officials.

When the bill came to a vote in the House in February, Ms. Sandberg offered public support online, urging Congress to "make sure we pass meaningful and strong legislation to stop sex trafficking."

In March, The Times, The Observer of London and The Guardian prepared to publish a joint investigation into how Facebook user data had been appropriated by Cambridge Analytica to profile American voters. A few days before publication, The Times presented Facebook with evidence that copies of improperly acquired Facebook data still existed, despite earlier promises by Cambridge executives and others to delete it.

Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg met with their lieutenants to determine a response. They decided to pre-empt the stories, saying in a statement published late on a Friday night that Facebook had suspended Cambridge Analytica from its platform. The executives figured that getting ahead of the news would soften its blow, according to people in the discussions.

They were wrong. The story drew worldwide outrage, prompting lawsuits and official investigations in Washington, London and Brussels. For days, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg remained out of sight, mulling how to respond. While the Russia investigation had devolved into an increasingly partisan battle, the Cambridge scandal set off Democrats and Republicans alike. And in Silicon Valley, other tech firms began exploiting the outcry to burnish their own brands.

"We're not going to traffic in your personal life," Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, said in an MSNBC interview. "Privacy to us is a human right. It's a civil liberty." (Mr. Cook's criticisms infuriated Mr. Zuckerberg, who later ordered his management team to use only Android phones - arguing that the operating system had far more users than Apple's.)

Facebook scrambled anew. Executives quietly shelved an internal communications campaign, called "We Get It," meant to assure employees that the company was committed to getting back on track in 2018.

Then Facebook went on the offensive. Mr. Kaplan prevailed on Ms. Sandberg to promote Kevin Martin, a former Federal Communications Commission chairman and fellow Bush administration veteran, to lead the company's American lobbying efforts. Facebook also expanded its work with Definers.

On a conservative news site called the NTK Network, dozens of articles blasted Google and Apple for unsavory business practices. One story called Mr. Cook hypocritical for chiding Facebook over privacy, noting that Apple also collects reams of data from users. Another played down the impact of the Russians' use of Facebook.

The rash of news coverage was no accident: NTK is an affiliate of Definers, sharing offices and staff with the public relations firm in Arlington, Va. Many NTK Network stories are written by staff members at Definers or America Rising, the company's political opposition-research arm, to attack their clients' enemies. While the NTK Network does not have a large audience of its own, its content is frequently picked up by popular conservative outlets, including Breitbart.

Mr. Miller acknowledged that Facebook and Apple do not directly compete. Definers' work on Apple is funded by a third technology company, he said, but Facebook has pushed back against Apple because Mr. Cook's criticism upset Facebook.

If the privacy issue comes up, Facebook is happy to "muddy the waters," Mr. Miller said over drinks at an Oakland, Calif., bar last month.

On Thursday, after this article was published, Facebook said that it had ended its relationship with Definers, without citing a reason.

In public, Facebook was more conciliatory. Mr. Zuckerberg agreed to testify on Capitol Hill. The company unveiled a gauzy advertising campaign, titled "Here Together," to apologize to its users. Days before Mr. Zuckerberg's appearance in Congress in April, Facebook announced that it was endorsing Ms. Klobuchar's Honest Ads bill and would pre-emptively begin disclosing political ad buyers. It also informed users whose data had been improperly harvested by Cambridge Analytica.

But Mr. Zuckerberg's good-will tour was bumpy. Thanks to intensive coaching and preparation, the company's communications team believed, he had effectively parried tough questions at the April hearing. But they worried he had come off as robotic - a suspicion confirmed by Facebook's pollsters.

Mr. Zuckerberg's political instincts were no more well-tuned. During a break in one hearing, he buttonholed Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican who leads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, to express his surprise at how tough on Facebook Democrats had been.

Mr. Walden was taken aback, said people who knew of the remark. Facebook's leader, Mr. Walden realized, did not understand the breadth of the anger now aimed at his creation.

Ms. Sandberg had said little publicly about the company's problems. But inside Facebook, her approach had begun to draw criticism.

Some colleagues believed that Ms. Sandberg - whose ambitions to return to public life were much discussed at the company - was protecting her own brand at Facebook's expense. At one company gathering, said two people who knew of the event, friends told Ms. Sandberg that if Facebook did not address the scandals effectively, its role in spreading hate and fear would define her legacy, too.

So Ms. Sandberg began taking a more personal role in the company's Washington campaign, drawing on all the polish that Mr. Zuckerberg sometimes lacked. She not only relied on her old Democratic ties, but also sought to assuage skeptical Republicans, who grumbled that Facebook was more sensitive to the political opinions of its work force than to those of powerful committee leaders. Trailing an entourage of as many as 10 people on trips to the capital, Ms. Sandberg made a point of sending personal thank-you notes to lawmakers and others she met.

Her top Republican target was Mr. Burr, whose Senate committee's Russia investigation had chugged along. The two spoke by phone, according to a congressional staff member and a Facebook executive, and met in person this fall. While critics cast Facebook as a serial offender that had ignored repeated warning signs about the dangers posed by its product, Ms. Sandberg argued that the company was grappling earnestly with the consequences of its extraordinary growth.

She made the same case in June at a conference of the National Association of Attorneys General in Portland, Ore. At the time, several attorneys general had opened or joined investigations into the company. Facebook was eager to head off further trouble.

The company organized several private receptions, including what was billed as a conversation with Ms. Sandberg about "corporate citizenship in the digital age" and a briefing on Cambridge Analytica.

While Facebook had publicly declared itself ready for new federal regulations, Ms. Sandberg privately contended that the social network was already adopting the best reforms and policies available. Heavy-handed regulation, she warned, would only disadvantage smaller competitors.

Some of the officials were skeptical. But Ms. Sandberg's presence - companies typically send lower-ranking executives to such gatherings - persuaded others that Facebook was serious about addressing its problems, according to two who attended the conference.

Facebook also continued to look for ways to deflect criticism to rivals. In June, after The Times reported on Facebook's previously undisclosed deals to share user data with device makers - partnerships Facebook had failed to disclose to lawmakers - executives ordered up focus groups in Washington.

In separate sessions with liberals and conservatives, about a dozen at a time, Facebook previewed messages to lawmakers. Among the approaches it tested was bringing YouTube and other social media platforms into the controversy, while arguing that Google struck similar data-sharing deals.

By then, some of the harshest criticism of Facebook was coming from the political left, where activists and policy experts had begun calling for the company to be broken up.

In July, organizers with a coalition called Freedom from Facebook crashed a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, where a company executive was testifying about its policies. As the executive spoke, the organizers held aloft signs depicting Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg, who are both Jewish, as two heads of an octopus stretching around the globe.

Eddie Vale, a Democratic public relations strategist who led the protest, later said the image was meant to evoke old cartoons of Standard Oil, the Gilded Age monopoly. But a Facebook official quickly called the Anti-Defamation League, a leading Jewish civil rights organization, to flag the sign. Facebook and other tech companies had partnered with the civil rights group since late 2017 on an initiative to combat anti-Semitism and hate speech online.

That afternoon, the A.D.L. issued a warning from its Twitter account.

"Depicting Jews as an octopus encircling the globe is a classic anti-Semitic trope," the organization wrote. "Protest Facebook - or anyone - all you want, but pick a different image." The criticism was soon echoed in conservative outlets including The Washington Free Beacon, which has sought to tie Freedom from Facebook to what the publication calls "extreme anti-Israel groups."

An A.D.L. spokeswoman, Betsaida Alcantara, said the group routinely fielded reports of anti-Semitic slurs from journalists, synagogues and others. "Our experts evaluate each one based on our years of experience, and we respond appropriately," Ms. Alcantara said. (The group has at times sharply criticized Facebook, including when Mr. Zuckerberg suggested that his company should not censor Holocaust deniers.)

Facebook also used Definers to take on bigger opponents, such as Mr. Soros, a longtime boogeyman to mainstream conservatives and the target of intense anti-Semitic smears on the far right. A research document circulated by Definers to reporters this summer, just a month after the House hearing, cast Mr. Soros as the unacknowledged force behind what appeared to be a broad anti-Facebook movement.

He was a natural target. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in January, he had attacked Facebook and Google, describing them as a monopolist "menace" with "neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions."

Definers pressed reporters to explore the financial connections between Mr. Soros's family or philanthropies and groups that were members of Freedom from Facebook, such as Color of Change, an online racial justice organization, as well as a progressive group founded by Mr. Soros's son. (An official at Mr. Soros's Open Society Foundations said the philanthropy had supported both member groups, but not Freedom from Facebook, and had made no grants to support campaigns against Facebook.)

Definers also circulated research about other critics of Facebook, such as Diamond and Silk, the pro-Trump social media stars who had claimed they were treated unfairly by Facebook.

In at least one instance, the company also relied on Mr. Schumer, the New York senator and Senate Democratic leader. He has long worked to advance Silicon Valley's interests on issues such as commercial drone regulations and patent reform. During the 2016 election cycle, he raised more money from Facebook employees than any other member of Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Mr. Schumer also has a personal connection to Facebook: His daughter Alison joined the firm out of college and is now a marketing manager in Facebook's New York office, according to her LinkedIn profile.

In July, as Facebook's troubles threatened to cost the company billions of dollars in market value, Mr. Schumer confronted Mr. Warner, by then Facebook's most insistent inquisitor in Congress.

Back off, he told Mr. Warner, according to a Facebook employee briefed on Mr. Schumer's intervention. Mr. Warner should be looking for ways to work with Facebook, Mr. Schumer advised, not harm it. Facebook lobbyists were kept abreast of Mr. Schumer's efforts to protect the company, according to the employee.

A Senate aide briefed on the exchange said that Mr. Schumer had not wanted Mr. Warner to lose sight of the need for Facebook to tackle problems with right-wing disinformation and election interference, as well as consumer privacy and other issues.

One morning in late summer, workers layered opaque contact paper onto the windows of a conference room in Facebook's Washington office. Not long after, a security guard was posted outside the door. It was an unusual sight: Facebook prided itself on open office plans and transparent, glass-walled conference rooms.

But Ms. Sandberg was set to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee - a pivotal encounter for her embattled company - and her aides were taking no chances.

Inside the room, they labored to prepare her for the hearing. They had assembled a binder-size briefing book, covering virtually every issue she might be questioned about, and had hired a former White House lawyer who specialized in training corporate executives.

Facebook lobbyists had already worked the Intelligence Committee hard, asking that lawmakers refrain from questioning Ms. Sandberg about privacy issues, Cambridge Analytica and censorship. The argument was persuasive with Mr. Burr, who was determined to avoid a circuslike atmosphere. A day before the hearing, he issued a stern warning to all committee members to stick to the topic of election interference.

In the committee room the next day was an empty chair behind a placard labeled "Google." Facebook had lobbied for the hearing to include a Google emissary of similar rank to Ms. Sandberg. The company won a partial victory when Mr. Burr announced that Larry Page, a Google co-founder, had been invited, along with Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive.

Mr. Dorsey showed up. Mr. Page did not.

As the hearing unfolded, senators excoriated Google for its absence, earning a wave of negative news coverage for Facebook's rival.

Ms. Sandberg spread neatly handwritten notes on the table before her: the names of each senator on the committee, their pet questions and concerns, a reminder to say thank you.

In large letters were her stage directions: "Slow, Pause, Determined."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Delay, Deny, Deflect: How Facebook Leaders Leaned Out in Crisis. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook's Leaders Fought Through Crisis

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Sheryl Sandberg was seething. Inside Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 American election.

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Module 2: Reporting Harassment & Discrimination

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Module 2: Reporting Harassment & Discrimination

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An interesting perspective on reporting sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere.

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A memory scientist's advice on reporting harassment and discrimination | Julia Shaw

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This is a great visual representation of the quality triple bottom line: economy (or management), environment, and society.

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This video presents a compelling case for Baby Boomers to learn from Millennials and the other way around.

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What baby boomers can learn from millennials at work -- and vice versa | Chip Conley

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Certainly an aspect of the new global reality of business is that workers in the United States cannot compete with cheap foreign labor.

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Module 3: The International Legal Environment

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Module 3: The International Legal Environment

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I noticed the news that an executive from the Chinese firm Huawei has been accused of violating the Iran sanctions.

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Huawei's Meng Wanzhou Granted Bail by Canadian Judge

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Huawei Technologies Co.'s finance chief must reside at Vancouver homes and adhere to curfew while awaiting a decision on her extradition to the U.S.

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Here are some recent news about the European Union, one of the international market organizations that we learned about.

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ECB Stimulus's Mixed Legacy: Economic Success, Political Fiasco

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The European Central Bank is nearing a landmark decision to wind down its $3 trillion bond-buying program, closing a chapter on a policy the U.S. used to help restore its growth but one that had mixed results in Europe.

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Module 3: The Challenges of Multinational Communication

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Module 3: The Challenges of Multinational Communication

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I found this interesting article and video about communication in multinational workplace environments.

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In multinational businesses, team members often have to communicate information to colleagues based across the globe. But for a host of reasons, that information sharing often doesn't happen as effectively as it should.
Wharton management professor Martine Haas was curious about precisely which issues were most responsible for impairing that vital communication, and what could be done to improve it. She and Jonathon Cummings of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business revealed what they learned in their paper, "Barriers to Knowledge Seeking within MNC Teams: Which Differences Matter Most?", published in the Journal of International Business Studies. In this interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Haas details their findings, and talks about what they mean for managers in the global economy.
An edited transcript of the conversation appears below. Dealing with differences
This research was motivated by the idea that multinationals use lots and lots of teams to get their work done, but multinational teams struggle to really succeed and we know that is a big problem in lots of organizations. You've got people all around the world and people don't share their information, their knowledge, enough with each other or as much as they could. So we're trying to figure out: Why is that? What are some of the problems that these teams face? And how can they be overcome?

The particular focus of this study is on the fact that these teams are so diverse. We talk about four different kinds of diversity. We've got people from different geographic locations and we've got people of different nationalities. We've got people who work in different parts of their organizations - we call them structural differences. People are demographically diverse - some are older than others. And some people have been in the organization longer than others. So there are lots of different kinds of differences.

"When I say they mattered, it means they created barriers to knowledge-seeking within this team."

The question that we focus on is which of these differences actually matter for sharing knowledge in these teams and, moreover, which of them matter most? That's the research question and to address it, we collected original survey data from more than 2,000 members of around 289 teams. So, almost 290 teams in one very, very large, very well-known multinational organization with more than 100,000 employees around the world. We collected data on all of the differences between the members of these teams, and we did a lot of research to understand which differences matter most and also how might they be overcome. In particular, we looked at whether the people knew each other and had worked together before as one of the things that might help them to overcome those kinds of differences.
'Location, location, location'
The real question is which differences matter most? We're looking at these four kinds of differences - geographic, nationality-based, structural differences (working in different parts of the organizational structure) and demographic differences. What we found was that two of these kinds of differences mattered much more than the other two, and in particular, geographic differences really mattered. Working in different countries and structural differences - working in different parts of the organizational structure - mattered.

When I say they mattered, it means they created barriers to knowledge-seeking within this team, barriers to people going and asking each other for help or for information related to work. Nationality differences and demographic differences also mattered. They also created barriers between the team members, but not [as much as the other two]. The ones that were really big were the geographic differences and the structural differences. But the good news was that if you had worked together before in a team, you could get over to some extent those geographic and structural barriers. So those were the key findings.
The surprising significance of structural differences
I think probably the most striking finding - and it kind of emerged really early on as we were looking at the data - was the importance of structural differences. When you think about multinational teams, there's a lot of attention paid to the fact that people work in different parts of the world and that they're different nationalities. These people are also coming from different parts of the organization usually and we found this was a really strong - to some extent, the strongest - barrier. So the fact that people worked in different divisions in the organization - different functional areas or different business units - those kinds of differences were really problematic for the members of those teams. And, I think, that was the most surprising to us, given that the focus is usually on nationality and geography.

"If we're in the same country and we're different nationalities it's actually not a very big deal. If we're in different countries - even if we're the same nationality - that's a big deal."

Key takeaways for multinational managers
I think part of it is recognizing the real variety of differences that there are. We tend to focus a lot on specific ones. Like, we know that the fact that we're in different time zones is really a big problem, and that's part of working in different geographic locations. We know that when people on one team speak different languages, it's a big deal. Managers tend to focus on some of the most obvious things that are really salient when you're internationally dispersed. But the structural stuff, for example, which we found to be surprisingly important, we don't think about as much in a global team. I think, for managers, the key takeaway is being really aware that there are a very wide variety of differences that you need to pay attention to and monitor if you really want people to be sharing knowledge as much as they could be inside the teams.

On the plus side for managers, if you've got people who have worked together before, that can help. So when managers are composing their teams, our research suggests that really paying attention to that is important. We know there are lots of good things about people having worked together in the past, but often, we don't include people who have worked together in the past because we're trying to get the best team for that particular project, and we tend to downplay that criterion. But the research suggests that managers could benefit a lot from ... trying to create a team with people who know each other a little bit already.
Other key findings
Probably the most important one is that nationality is not so important. Then again, it's not that nationality differences don't matter - nationality being where you were born, where you come from, as well as your native language. Those kinds of differences create a barrier to knowledge seeking between us, but we found that it's a much less important barrier than the fact that we may be in different countries. If we're in the same country and we're different nationalities it's actually not a very big deal. If we're in different countries - even if we're the same nationality - that's a big deal. There is a lot of attention again on multinational teams. We tend to focus a lot on these kinds of cross-cultural differences and nationality based differences. In fact, our research suggests that if you compare them to other kinds of differences, they matter, but not as much as geography or organizational structure seem to matter.
Breaking new ground
Most of the research in this area is on teams, and there's some research - not as much, obviously - on multinational teams. Most research tends to focus on one or two kinds of differences. So most of that research will say nationality differences matter. Or geographic differences matter - there's a lot of research on geographically disbursed teams. But I'm not aware of any studies that have pulled together as many different kinds of differences and said, "Well, if you look at them all together, we find they all matter and actually create barriers within teams. But look, some of them matter quite a bit more than others when you're able to compare them side by side."

"The research suggests that managers could benefit a lot from really paying attention to trying to get people [on teams together] who know each other a little bit already."

I think that's one of the things that is probably most distinctive in terms of what our study has been able to do. The other aspect of it is that we have a large sample of teams that we're able to compare. So around 290 teams, more than 2,000 team members, and we're looking at all of the individual pairs within those teams. That's a much larger and richer data set with lots of different differences than the prior research has tackled.
Next steps
My co-author, Jonathan Cummings, and I both do a lot of research related to teams in large, complex organizations like large multinationals, and collaboration more generally across these organizations. One of the things that I'm most interested in is what are the conditions that enable teams to be more effective - and in this case, particularly multinational teams. Teams do have these kinds of differences, and usually we can't make those go away. So what are the conditions that can help those teams to be more successful? And not just in terms of being able to share knowledge effectively but also, what makes them more innovative? What makes them more efficient or more able to implement their projects or their programs?

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Why Your Multinational Team Has Trouble Communicating

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In multinational businesses, team members often have to communicate information to colleagues based across the globe. But for a host of reasons, that information sharing often doesn't happen as effectively as it should. Wharton management professor Martine Haas was curious about precisely which issues were most responsible for impairing that vital communication, and what could be done to improve it.

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Module 3: Working for a Multinational Corporation

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Module 3: Working for a Multinational Corporation

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It could feel like this to work among people of diverse countries.

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Here is an example of a probability tree, which is one decision-making tool we read about in this module.

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Module 4: Amazon Chooses Locations of New Headquarters

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Module 4: Amazon Chooses Locations of New Headquarters

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Amazon recently had to make a big decision. It was fascinating and instructive to follow this story.

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Crystal City, a neighborhood in Arlington, Va., is a possible location for Amazon's second headquarters, which the company is now expected to split across two sites. Credit Credit Jared Soares for The New York Times

SEATTLE - After conducting a yearlong search for a second home, Amazon has switched gears and is now finalizing plans to have a total of 50,000 employees in two locations, according to people familiar with the decision-making process.

The company is nearing a deal to move to the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, according to two of the people briefed on the discussions. Amazon is also close to a deal to move to the Crystal City area of Arlington, Va., a Washington suburb, one of the people said. Amazon already has more employees in those two areas than anywhere else outside of Seattle, its home base, and the Bay Area.

Amazon executives met two weeks ago with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the governor's Manhattan office, said one of the people briefed on the process, adding that the state had offered potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies. Executives met separately with Mayor Bill de Blasio, a person briefed on that discussion said. Long Island City is a short subway ride across the East River from Midtown Manhattan.
[Read more on the fast-growing Queens neighborhood of Long Island City could be doing to prepare for Amazon.]

"I am doing everything I can," Governor Cuomo told reporters when asked Monday about the state's efforts to lure the company. "We have a great incentive package," he said.

"I'll change my name to Amazon Cuomo if that's what it takes," Governor Cuomo said. "Because it would be a great economic boost."

The need to hire tens of thousands of high-tech workers has been the driving force behind the search, leading many to expect it to land in a major East Coast metropolitan area. Many experts have pointed to Crystal City as a front-runner, because of its strong public transit, educated work force and proximity to Washington.
[Crystal City's upsides: good transit, diverse residents, a friendly business climate and a single developer with a big chunk of land.]
JBG Smith, a developer who owns much of the land in Crystal City, declined to comment, as did Arlington County officials.

Amazon declined to comment on whether it had made any final decisions. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Amazon's decision to pick two new locations instead of one.

About 1,800 people in advertising, fashion and publishing already work for Amazon in New York, and roughly 2,500 corporate and technical employees work in Northern Virginia and Washington.

Amazon narrowed the list to 20 cities in January, and in recent weeks, smaller locations appeared to fall out of the running. For example, although Denver made the initial cut, Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado said last month, "Wouldn't they rather have their second big hub on the East Coast?"

Amazon announced plans for a second headquarters in September 2017, saying that the company was growing faster than it could hire in its hometown Seattle. The company said it would invest more than $5 billion over almost two decades in a second headquarters, hiring as many as 50,000 full-time employees that would earn more than $100,000 a year on average.

HQ2 would be "full equal to our current campus in Seattle," the company said. If Amazon goes ahead with two new sites, it is unclear whether the company would refer to both of the locations as headquarters or if they would amount to large satellite offices.

Picking multiple sites would allow it to tap into two pools of talented labor and perhaps avoid being blamed for all of the housing and traffic woes of dominating a single area. It could also give the company greater leverage in negotiating tax incentives, experts said.

"Even if the most obvious reasons appear to be about attracting more tech workers, the P.R. and government incentives benefits could help, too," said Jed Kolko, chief economist at Indeed, the online jobs site. With big presences in two cities, the local governments "might feel pressure to increase the incentives they are offering Amazon, and the surprise is yet another news cycle for the Amazon headquarters process," he said.

The HQ2 search sent states and cities into a frenzied bidding war. Some hired McKinsey & Company and other outside consultants to help them with their bids, investing heavily in courting Amazon and its promise of 50,000 jobs. Even half of that would amount to one of the largest corporate location deals, according to Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, which tracks corporate subsidies. "These are very big numbers," he said.

As Amazon's search dragged on, residents in many of 20 finalist cities worried about the impact such a massive project could have on housing and traffic, as well as what potential tax incentives could cost the community. The decision to split into two sites could alleviate some of that resistance.

Seattle has been one of the fastest growing cities in the country, in part because of Amazon's growth. The company has about 45,000 employees in the city, and the company said it needed to hire more employees than the city could attract or absorb.

"Not everybody wants to live in the Northwest," Jeff Wilke, the head of Amazon's retail division, said at a conference last year. "It's been terrific for me and my family, but I think we may find another location allows us to recruit a different collection of employees."

Amazon gave cities six weeks to pitch themselves in a public courtship. Almost 240 municipalities responded, trying to lure the tech giant with marketing gimmicks, promises of new transit lines and, as proposals trickled out, billions in tax incentives.

The details of most bids are not public, to the frustration of even some lawmakers. A few elected officials from the short list of 20 cities signed what amounted to a mutual nonaggression pact, trying to avoid a bidding war that would give up too much from taxpayers.

But mostly, cities continued their hard sell, showing Amazon executives around their proposed sites and trying to assure the company that the region had sufficient housing and transportation. Since wrapping up visits with cities in the spring, Amazon has been almost silent on the search. That led journalists, residents and politicians to look for clues in new job postings and the flight path of the corporate jet used by Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive.

To meet its own deadlines, Amazon will need to move fast. It had said it wanted 500,000 square feet of office space - enough for thousands of employees - available for use next year.

Jay Brodsky, who lives in Arlington, Va., said about a week ago that his wife took part in a 45-minute phone survey about her opinion if Amazon moved to the area. "It was everything from, 'What do you think about the local government,' to 'Are you concerned about traffic?'" he said. She received an Amazon gift card for participating.

"People are sort of on pins and needles," Mr. Brodsky said. "It's almost like people want it to happen, and are afraid of what would happen if it does."

Follow Karen Weise on Twitter: @kyweise.
Karen Weise reported from Seattle, and J. David Goodman from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Amazon's Pick for Second Home Is Said to Be Two Second Homes. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 Between Long Island City, N.Y., and Arlington, Va.

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SEATTLE - After conducting a yearlong search for a second home, Amazon has switched gears and is now finalizing plans to have a total of 50,000 employees in two locations, according to people familiar with the decision-making process.

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The example of the operation of gas stations in New Jersey shows how the legal environment affects businesses' strategies.

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Legislators in New Jersey have proposed allowing self-service at gas stations, but the public backlash was ferocious. Credit Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times

At 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, New Jersey became the last state in the nation where drivers are not allowed to pump their own gasoline around the clock.

That is when Oregon, the only other holdover from the full-service era of the 1970s, loosened its restrictions. Its new law allows residents of most counties with fewer than 40,000 people to fuel up their cars themselves.

That leaves Jersey, only Jersey, with its dense tangle of highways and byways, its turnpike rest stops named for state luminaries and its status as the home of the first drive-in theater, as the sole state where it is illegal everywhere to fill your own tank 24 hours a day.

It is a distinction that makes Declan J. O'Scanlon Jr., a state lawmaker, spout frustration by the gallon.

"It's ridiculous," said Mr. O'Scanlon, a Republican assemblyman from Monmouth County who will soon take a seat in the State Senate. "If I want to pull in, get in and out quickly, I should be able to do so."

Mr. O'Scanlon said that he frequently pumps his own gas, ignoring the Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act of 1949, the statute that first forbade civilians from putting their grubby hands on the nozzle.

"I break the law in New Jersey on a regular basis," he said. "Someone can come to my door and cuff me if they want."

Two years ago in the Assembly, Mr. O'Scanlon was one of several legislators to sponsor a bill allowing self-service stations. It stalled.

One prominent opponent of the idea is the president of the State Senate, Stephen M. Sweeney, a Democrat, who remains immovable. In an emailed statement Friday, Mr. Sweeney said that he saw no good reason to change a system that worked.

"When we have winters like the one this year, I don't see many men and women who want to pump their own gas," he said. "It's something that makes New Jersey a little more unique and the people of New Jersey like it that way."

Polling and interviews suggest that the state's natives agree. The actor Bobby Cannavale, who grew up in the state, said that it never bothers him, though he does forget every time he leaves and comes back, and has to be ushered back into his car by the attendant. He added that he sometimes gets nervous for a split second that he'll never get his credit card back.

"You're sitting in your car just handing a guy your credit card," he said. "He can hand it to another guy in another car and you're done."

Chris Christie proposed self-serve gas during his gubernatorial campaign in 2009, but dropped the proposal because the negative response from the public was so ferocious. At a town hall-style meeting in 2016, he said that it was a gender issue, citing a poll that indicated that 78 percent of women in the state were only too happy to stay in their cars.

Ashley Koning, the director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University, said in an interview that the idea of pumping one's own gas had never been broadly favorable in New Jersey.

"It's kind of one of the third rails of state politics," she said, noting that women and older people in particular enjoyed the service.

A December 2015 Rutgers-Eagleton poll found that almost three-quarters of the state's residents preferred to have gas pumped for them, and that 84 percent of women preferred the service.

And when she takes off her polling hat, Ms. Koning said, she is one of those women.

"As a Jersey Girl, I'm definitely not for it," she said. "Jersey is very proud and one of the things it's proud of is not having to pump its own gas."

Some pollsters have stopped asking the question altogether. Krista Jenkins, the director of Fairleigh Dickinson University's polling unit, said that it had not come up since 2012 because "it hasn't really been that much of a debate."

In that year, the university found that 63 percent of voters supported the law and only 23 percent opposed it, with a similarly exaggerated gender gap.

Ms. Jenkins grew up in Southern California, and pumped her own gas.

"But," she said, "in the dead of winter when you don't have to get out of your car, it's a lovely feature of living in the state."

The response of some Oregon residents to that state's loosening of restrictions may not encourage change in Jersey. A widely shared tweet highlighted comments on a local news story from Medford, in Jackson County, Oregon. Among residents' concerns were "smelling of gas when I get it on my hands or clothes" and the potential health effects of breathing in small amounts over time.

New Jersey legislators cited safety concerns when they passed the original law that barred residents from pumping gas almost 70 years ago. But when gas station owners challenged the ban in 1951, the state's Supreme Court ruled that self-serve was indeed "dangerous in use." And the ban held up, despite attempts to fight it in the 1980s.

In the rest of the country, self-service stations became the norm. Safer unleaded gasoline became more common, thanks to federal regulations, as did pumps that accepted credit cards. In most of the United States, that spelled the end of an era when attendants offered to wipe your windshield and check your oil while the tank filled up and you fumbled for a tip.

Mr. O'Scanlon is undeterred by the dual weights of history and public opinion. He said that he may bring a new proposal this year, just to keep the conversation alive. He said that economic arguments about jobs and safety are absurd, given that drivers in other states have been pumping their own gas for decades and lived to tell the tale.

"The only thing you could argue is that New Jerseyans are more flammable than people in the other 49 states," he said. "Because we eat so much oily pizza, funnel cake and fries, maybe you could make that argument. Otherwise, it's simply ridiculous."

Correction:

A previous version of this article described incorrectly a new law in Oregon. The new law allows residents of most counties with fewer than 40,000 people to fuel up their cars themselves, at any hour of the day, not merely between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: New Jersey Is Last State to Insist at Gas Stations: Don't Touch That Pump. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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New Jersey Is Last State to Insist at Gas Stations: Don't Touch That Pump

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At 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, New Jersey became the last state in the nation where drivers are not allowed to pump their own gasoline around the clock. That is when Oregon, the only other holdover from the full-service era of the 1970s, loosened its restrictions.

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This page contains a good introduction and quiz on the topic of organizational objectives.

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Definition of Organizational Objectives

Organizational objectives are short-term and medium-term goals that an organization seeks to accomplish. An organization's objectives will play a large part in developing organizational policies and determining the allocation of organizational resources. Achievement of objectives helps an organization reach its overall strategic goals.

Key Concepts

Setting objectives can involve many factors. You can set a single objective for your organization or multiple objectives. You set target deadlines for the accomplishment of objectives. Other critical factors include who controls the decisions that will affect objective achievement. The decision-makers must be committed to the objectives.

Organizational politics will come into play, with differing interests supporting the advance of objectives that are best for them. This usually results in bargaining between various interest groups in the organization, which results in objectives that are satisfactory to the key organizational groups, such as sales, research and development, marketing, and production. Finally, you must take into account factors that can hinder setting and achieving objectives, such as time, institutional, financial, and environmental constraints.

Example

Let's say that you are the director of a non-profit organization that assists recently-arrived immigrants to your community. The organization provides language classes, civics classes, financial planning classes, and assistance in obtaining housing and work. Your organization's strategic goal is simple: help immigrants integrate into the community. The programs are the means by which you hope to achieve that strategic goal. Your sources of revenue are limited because they are based only upon donations and state and federal grants. You are meeting with the program directors for the annual meeting to set the organization's objectives for the next year.

Unfortunately, given the state of the economy, donations are down and competition for government grants has become fierce. Each program director zealously advocates for advancement of his or her program, but there are going to be winners and losers this year because of the funding. You all agree that each program should be maintained, because they are essential in achieving the organization's goal of integrating newly-arrived immigrants. However, you decide to focus your efforts this year on language classes, work assistance, and housing assistance because you feel these three programs are absolutely essential for the achievement of your strategic goal.

You and your team come up with the following objectives for the year:

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organizational objectives: definition & examples - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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Organizational Objectives: Definition & Examples - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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Organizational objectives are short-term and medium-term goals that an organization seeks to accomplish. An organization's objectives will play a large part in developing organizational policies and determining the allocation of organizational resources. Achievement of objectives helps an organization reach its overall strategic goals. Setting objectives can involve many factors.

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Below is a simple example of a Gantt chart, one of the scheduling tools we learned about in class.

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This lesson teaches the basics of leadership, responsibility and authority in an organization.

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Confused? We throw some terms into our business conversations, often unsure about what they mean. Particularly words related to roles and goals. Issue shows up when we delegate actions to accomplish objectives. Confusion is delay or death to projects. Ever say or hear, "But, I didn't know I was supposed to do that!"

We may be unclear about the goal, the roles and responsibilities of the implementation team (and its individual members), who is accountable for what actions, and what authority do they have to perform their roles.

Clarity is the pathway to minimize misunderstandings and maximize success. Really.
Moving parts
Each part of an important undertaking needs some defined behaviors - independent of the specific content of the project. This assumes that the team members have the necessary job skills to perform their specific tasks.

These behaviors include establishing clear goals, defining the roles of the team members, clarifying who is responsible for what, who will be held accountable for meeting targets, and what authority do team members have in their roles.

What does each of these behavioral components mean? Here are some definitions:

Goals - these are the one or more milestones and the end-point of a project. What needs to be accomplished, by when, and under what circumstances. And with what constraints (e.g., time, financial, labor). Example: a new product must be into the market by the end of the year with a $2 million budget.

Roles - what is the makeup of the team with the necessary skills to meet or beat the goal. What part does each individual fulfill - what are their tasks. Are expectations laid out and communicated. Example: the head of manufacturing engineering must integrate the engineering design into production.

Responsibility - who will ensure that each part of the project is completed on time and within budget. Who can be called upon to answer questions about the project and progress against milestones. Example: the project manager and their team must keep all parts of the project on time, report issues, and find resources to solve issues.

Accountability - while responsibility can be shared among several people, accountability cannot. Who is the one person who must answer to the success (or failure) of a project or goal. It might be a department leader, project leader, or the CEO. Example: the marketing vice-president must answer to the failure of a critical new product launch.

Authority - what latitude does a team leader or individual have for budgetary decisions. Example: who has the authority to hire specialists for support in a major reorganizational project for the company. Is it the VP of HR or the leader of the reorganization project.

"How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time." - Fred Brooks, IBM, former leader of mainframe computer development

The "nots"

In defining and documenting goals, roles, responsibilities, accountabilities, and authorities, it is important also to describe what things are not included. Example: in a new sales program, the head of a product line does not have the responsibility to manage the supporting marketing program. Marketing leadership does. Cut confusion.
The bottom lines
Clarity. You are starting a critical project. When choosing the implementation team, clarity counts. Goals, roles, responsibilities, accountabilities, and authorities spelled out (and documented) is a foundational leadership practice. Make it part of the culture. Win.

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Leadership lesson Who's in charge? - Phoenix Business Journal

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Confused? We throw some terms into our business conversations, often unsure about what they mean. Particularly words related to roles and goals. Issue shows up when we delegate actions to accomplish objectives. Confusion is delay or death to projects. Ever say or hear, "But, I didn't know I was supposed to do that!"

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Module 5: The Power of Corporate Culture

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Module 5: The Power of Corporate Culture

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Below is a news article about Arianna Huffington's take on creating a positive corporate culture.

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When Arianna Huffington speaks, HR leaders listen.

That's exactly what happened at the annual SAP SuccessConnect event this year when Huffington addressed thousands of HR pros during her captivating keynote discussion with SAP Executive Board Member Jennifer Morgan. The duo conversed openly about a variety of thorny HR issues leaning heavily on findings from their Thrive Global initiative.

"What we discovered over the years is that stress and burnout at work have become worse over the years and at the same time, the hunger for change is becoming deeper," said Huffington. "People are beginning to realize that all the major science and data is making it very clear that when the enterprise prioritizes the working of their employees, every business metric - recruitment, attrition, productivity, engagement - improves."

"I'm passionate about never using the word 'well-being' without using the word productive next to it," said Arianna Huffington at the annual SAP SuccessConnect event in Las Vegas. SAP

Huffington believes there is no such thing as work-life balance because work and life have become one. Thrive Global conducts many workshops around the world to help employees cope and partners with SAP on creating cutting-edge solutions like SAP SuccessFactors Work-Life that uses machine learning to anticipate and predict employee needs to improve their lives and performance.

"I'm passionate about never using the word well-being without using the word productive next to it," said Huffington. "We need to take well-being and wellness out of the fuzzy area of a soft benefit from the likes of benevolent HR professionals. This is hard core. This is about the bottom line."
Wellness for the modern era
Huffington recognizes that sometimes people have a dated view of what wellness means and it has become her mission to (re) define it for the modern era. Today, wellness involves turning the "big life" moments like promotions, a death in the family, a new baby, into opportunities. Huffington believes it's possible to process these big life moments into micro steps for employees to boost performance and quality of life that avoids burnout.

"In the fourth industrial revolution with the explosion of data, machine learning, AI, the things we hold up as a premium are human qualities: creativity, collaboration, resilience," said Huffington. "Yet these are the first things that are undermined when we're exhausted. Why are we ignoring this data that faces us?"

Case in point: Elon Musk's public meltdowns which Huffington chalks up to teachable moments for us all.

"This is a brilliant innovator and visionary who really bought into the collective delusion that in order for a person to succeed, he never had to leave the factory," said Huffington. "The reality is when you are a manager in any capacity your value-add is your decision-making ability."

It's one thing to talk in broad strokes about employee engagement and burnout. It's another thing entirely to tie meaningful business metrics to attrition and recruiting, productivity and results.

Huffington says this is what the Human Revolution is all about. It recognizes the importance of human capital and a company's culture.

"If your culture is weak, your immune system is weak and you're going to be susceptible to every example of bad behavior," said Huffington.

As a board member of Uber, Huffington was able to help apply some of her knowledge to help turn the company's culture around.

"When you're in a hyper growth environment, you allow top performers to get away with anything," said Huffington. As a result, Huffington spoke to the board and recommended that "from this day forward no brilliant jerks will be allowed" and also recommended the company move away from some of its core values of working longer, harder and smarter.

"Data makes it clear that working longer is not working smarter because it has diminishing returns," said Huffington. "If we're 'always on' we're not as smart, creative or wise."

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No More Brilliant Jerks: Arianna Huffington On The Power Of Changing Corporate Culture

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When Arianna Huffington speaks, HR leaders listen. That's exactly what happened at the annual SAP SuccessConnect event this year when Huffington addressed thousands of HR pros during her captivating keynote discussion with SAP Executive Board Member Jennifer Morgan . The duo conversed openly about a variety of thorny HR issues leaning heavily on findings from their Thrive Global initiative.

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Here is a well-constructed example of an organization chart for a firm's marketing department.

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Because I like math, I wanted to include this formula, which helps us understand span of management.

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Module 5: Labor Division in our Daily Lives

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Module 5: Labor Division in our Daily Lives

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This cute cartoon reminded me of the importance of division of labor.

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Module 6: The Pseudoscience of Human Resource Management

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Module 6: The Pseudoscience of Human Resource Management

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I found this talk very interesting and provocative because all aspects of management should be based on sound judgments.

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The (uncomfortable) truth of HR and leadership development | Patrick Vermeren | TEDxKMA

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Module 6: Interpersonal Communication at the Workplace

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Module 6: Interpersonal Communication at the Workplace

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This funny drawing drives home the importance of good communication in any organization.

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This report reminded me that proper formal channels of communication are crucial in any organization.

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At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks

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Buzzwords and anxiety fill the hallways at Netflix, as the Hollywood giant tries to maintain a winning culture amid breakneck growth.

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Module 6: Communicating in Spite of Differences

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Module 6: Communicating in Spite of Differences

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This excellent talk offers touches on the topic of effective communication.

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How to disagree productively and find common ground | Julia Dhar

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This lesson goes over the advantages and disadvantages of cross-sectional teams, which are a particular type of team in an organization.

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Definition, Advantages & Disadvantages

A cross-functional team is an organizational team consisting of members at the same level of hierarchy in the organization but serving in different areas.

Cross-functional teams provide an organization with some significant advantages. You can greatly increase creativity and problem solving with the use of cross-functional teams because of their composition. Members of cross-functional teams come with a diversity of experience, expertise, and knowledge. This diversity can help broaden perspectives and create synergy, where interaction of the members create a greater effect than the sum effects of each member acting alone, leading to a high level of creativity.

Cross-functional teams are not without disadvantages. The team can take significantly longer to develop cohesion because members come from different experiences and backgrounds. Moreover, a team leader must take care managing team relationships carefully because there may be a high level of conflict in these teams due to unit rivalry, egos, and possible conflict between the interests of the various parts of the organization represented by team members.

Example

Let's say you are the president of a publishing company that focuses on printing news magazines and newspapers. The last decade has not been kind to your company. Subscriptions are down by 30% and advertising revenue is down by 40%. Your company is on the verge of bankruptcy. Your board of directors has instructed you to come up with a viable plan to save the company within 90 days for their approval. If you are unable to come up with a viable plan, you have been instructed to hire counsel to place the company into bankruptcy.

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advantages & disadvantages - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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Cross-Functional Teams: Definition, Advantages & Disadvantages - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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A cross-functional team is an organizational team consisting of members at the same level of hierarchy in the organization but serving in different areas. Cross-functional teams provide an organization with some significant advantages. You can greatly increase creativity and problem solving with the use of cross-functional teams because of their composition.

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Module 7: Black Friday and the Motivation to Buy

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Module 7: Black Friday and the Motivation to Buy

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This is a newspaper's report and review of Black Friday this year (2018). It made me ponder the tactics retailers use to motivate customers to purchase their products.

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Shoppers walking along Fifth Avenue in New York on Friday. Credit Credit Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

Here we are again: Mildly annoyed by the obvious consumerism, but totally in love with the deals. It must be Black Friday.

The Friday after Thanksgiving is still the official start of the holiday shopping season, but things are changing. For starters, Thanksgiving is no longer sacred - shoppers head outside or online to get an early start before the turkey is even cold. And instead of lining up at the crack of dawn after sleeping off their feasts, more people are shopping on their phones. In fact, if you follow the advice of our friends at Wirecutter, you'll stay home and shop in your P.J.s. (Check out our full breakdown of how Black Friday has changed in recent years.)

Shoppers won't want for time this year: The gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas - 32 days if you don't count the holidays themselves - is long (next year it will be just 26 days). That means procrastinators get more time to put things off and retailers get one more shot at luring you in. But beware: Hanukkah is coming on the early side this year.

We'll be covering it all here, with reporters weighing in from near and far.

Just before 11 a.m. at the Fashion Island mall in Orange County, Calif., the line to see Santa Claus was about 15-people deep, including parents and grandparents. Laura Natale, who lives nearby, brought her three-year-old son Christopher to see Santa. Asked if the crowds were any larger than a typical Friday, she said: "Not really."

Others had anticipated more bustle at this palm-and-Christmas-tree-laden outdoor mall near Newport Beach, saying they remembered a bigger post-Thanksgiving rush last year. "It's more empty than I expected," said Michelle Gorczyza, who also lives in the area. She did encounter a long line at Anthropologie, so she skipped the store, deciding she could just as easily buy online.

Her husband Danny said that nowadays people come to the mall more for the food and the experience than the shopping. "You don't see people running around with 10 bags," he said. "They're happy to spend $50 on lunch and just soak in the atmosphere."

That's what 28-year old Mitch Williams did on this sunny morning, sitting beneath one of the palm trees. "My grandpa is visiting from Ohio, so we're having coffee and omelets."

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Was he doing any shopping? He shook his head no: "I do that online."
- Cade Metz
Black Friday, a "holiday" that wasn't a holiday until it was deemed to be by American retailers a few decades ago, has a remarkably enduring position on the calendar as the year's most significant celebration of commercialism.

Retailers start marketing it months in advance. Hordes of shoppers turn out in person and online. Google even programmed it into its calendar as an official holiday.

But Black Friday has competition. Lots of it.

Shopping holidays abound. World Fair Trade Day was May 12. Small Business Saturday falls on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The Monday after that is Cyber Monday - a creation of the not-so-long-ago era when shopping online seemed almost exotic. And Dec. 14 is Free Shipping Day.

Those are just the free-for-alls, where all retailers can participate.

Many companies have laid claim to their own corporate holidays. Alibaba's Singles Day festival on Nov. 11 topped $30 billion in sales. Customers bought more than 100 million products in Amazon's Prime Day event in July.

There was also Overstocktober, which Overstock.com used to push promotions before rebranding it as Customer Day on Oct. 15 of this year. eBay declared the second Monday of each December to be Green Monday. Wayfair had Way Day in April for what it calls "better-than-Black-Friday deals." Macy's held a "Black Friday in July" sale over the summer.

"If we've seen anything in retail over the last 20, 30 years, it's that consumers need to be motivated to shop," said Michael Brown, a partner with A.T. Kearney's retail practice. "They need to be provoked."

And not just in the United States. Boxing Day in Britain, which comes after Christmas, has evolved into a day to observe hallowed shopping rituals. In Australia, Click Frenzy in February focuses on online shopping.

For anyone above all that crass consumerism? There's a day for them, too.

The website for Buy Nothing Day urges consumers to "escape the Shopocalypse," noting that the "anarchy that ensues on Black Friday has now become an absurd dystopian phenomenon."
- Tiffany Hsu

Retailers and analysts said Black Friday 2018 got off to a strong start - and all indications were that it finished strong, too.

Adobe Analytics, reported that as of 8 p.m. Eastern, consumers had already spent about $4.1 billion on Black Friday - a 23 percent increase from the same period last year.

Though the cold weather in the eastern United States may have kept some shoppers home, Mastercard SpendingPulse said that generally "online sales appear to be filling in any weather related soft spots in brick and mortar sales." The clothing, electronics and interior furnishing sectors were seeing especially good traction, the analysis said.

The upbeat prognosis was supported, at least in part, by photos and videos posted Friday morning on Twitter, which showed long lines and bunches of bundled shoppers gathered at places including a Kohl's in Mansfield, Mass., and the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.

"Stores are busy, there's good traffic, the queues are manageable and well-staffed, and inventory levels appear to be good for the time of day too," said Frank Layo, managing director of Kurt Salmon, which is part of Accenture Strategy. "Retailers helped themselves by starting promotions much earlier this year to spread out the holiday shopping traffic and mitigate chaos. Their efforts appear to be paying off."
- Matt Stevens
Early in the day, J. Crew wrote on Twitter that it was "experiencing some technical difficulties" with its website. The site appeared to be functioning fine soon afterward.

About three hours later, the home page for Lowe's displayed a message that it was undergoing maintenance. The site was soon restored.

Still, analysts monitoring Black Friday said online sales were chugging along, driven in part by the cold, wet weather in some parts of the country, which they said may have nudged some shoppers away from stores and toward their computers or smartphones.
- Matt Stevens
Feeling overwhelmed by deals? You're not alone. In the hope of clearing out inventory, retailers bombard us with thousands of items that are marked on sale. Many of these products are of subpar quality, or they aren't actually on sale at all. We wrote a cheat sheet of the types of products that are hot - and the ones that are not - on Black Friday to help you home in on the quality, deeply discounted goods.

Here's the upshot: Black Friday is a great time to buy a new video game console, a television, headphones or a smart home product like the Amazon Echo or Google Home. One of the most notable deals we've seen: Best Buy, Amazon and many retailers are selling Sony's PlayStation 4 with a new Spider-Man game for $200, down from the normal price of $300 for the console alone. So come prepared: Jot down a list of things you'd like to buy in those categories and look out for price drops.
- Brian X. Chen
You clearly have an insatiable appetite for The Times's Black Friday coverage! Here are a few recent stories you might enjoy about this very American "holiday" and how it fits into the broader economy.

* Some stores haven't embraced the Black Friday madness. Among the holdouts: Dunham's department store in rural Pennsylvania. Michael Corkery recently visited to learn why it doesn't participate in Black Friday.

* F.A.O. Schwarz - the iconic but then shuttered toy store - is back, under new management: private equity. The new business model involves outposts in airports and "stores within stores" at larger retailers.

* Over in the Opinion section, David Leonhardt has a cool idea for anyone who is preparing to join the Black Friday scrum and spend on gifts or other purchases: Instead, use that money to subscribe or donate to a local news media organization!

* And for anyone who assumes that Amazon has put the final nail in the coffin of the bricks-and-mortar retail industry, not so fast: It turns out that more Americans are venturing back into stores, and some old-school retailers are actually doing better than in the recent past.
- David Enrich
Believe it or not, not everyone is a fan of Black Friday.

REI, the outdoor equipment retailer, has generated headlines every year since 2015 when it first said it would not open the day after Thanksgiving. Instead, REI urged people to spend time with friends and family in nature, with the hashtag #OptOutside.

This year will be no different. Even as major retailers plan to promote blockbuster sales, labor groups like Occupy New Hampshire Sea Coast say they will be staging protests in front of stores to draw attention to employment issues.

"We're fighting for respect and a fair wage at work," David Holt, one of the organizers of the demonstration, said in an interview on Wednesday. He added that Black Friday was an especially appealing time for labor movements to organize. "One of the things this Black Friday protest is about is consumerism."

Mr. Holt said he hoped that holding the demonstration in front of a Walmart would encourage shoppers to think about labor conditions for the store's employees.
- Zach Wichter
There is no Thanksgiving holiday in Europe, but that hasn't stopped the associated consumer bonanza from hitting shops there. French retail brands like Darty, Fnac and Monoprix joined Apple, Sephora and Uniqlo in efforts to attract bargain hunters on Friday.

In Britain, where sales used to take place after Christmas, shops have added Black Friday to their promotional calendars. Offers have been trickling in for at least a week. Amazon started its sales on Nov. 16.

Most other stores have joined the fray with even discount supermarkets offering money off everything from vintage turntables to legs of ham.
- Amie Tsang
Yes, Black Friday is everywhere - even Canada.

The "holiday" - in French-speaking Montreal, they call it "Vendredi Fou" - has reportedly become Canada's busiest shopping day of the year, eclipsing Boxing Day (or Dec. 26), when the traditional post-Christmas Day sales would bring out hordes of shoppers.

This Black Friday, the stores in Montreal were packed, especially in the underground, labyrinth-like malls such as Eaton Center, which was crowded with people seeking shelter from the subfreezing weather. Athletic wear, women's shoes and men's suits were marked off at 50 percent or more in the Eaton Center mall. Outside one electronics store, velvet ropes were set up to keep the queues under control.

It's said that Black Friday first migrated to Canada in the early 2000s, when the American and Canadian dollars were roughly on par. These days the greenback is worth 1.32 Canadian dollars, making these discounts even greater.
- Stuart Emmrich
China celebrated its own invented shopping holiday this month. The country's economic ascent has turned hundreds of millions of people into eager consumers. And they are buying stuff online with great gusto thanks in part to low wages that make shipping fast and cheap.

The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba said it sold $30.8 billion worth of goods on Nov. 11, the annual online bonanza known as Singles Day. The company rang up $1 billion in sales in the first 85 seconds of this year's frenzy. It took an hour to reach $10 billion. All in all, the company says it generated more than a billion delivery orders that day.

For some context: In the United States last year, online shopping from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday totaled about $19.62 billion, according to Adobe Analytics. (Yes, it's true, that doesn't include all the in-store shopping that took place on Black Friday.)

In addition to inundating phone owners with coupons and deals for weeks in advance, Alibaba deploys subtler methods to gin up sales on Singles Day. This year, users of the company's Taobao shopping app could see how their spending on Nov. 11 compared to that of other people in their area.

[Read more about this year's Singles Day, and why the party may not last]
- Raymond Zhong
For many shoppers, Black Friday actually begins right in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner.

Even on this, the second coldest Thanksgiving in New York City history, and the coldest since 1901, revelers still took to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and shoppers still lined up for Black Friday deals ( or at least paid someone to do it).

Walmart took the lead competing head-on with Thanksgiving dinner by throwing in-store parties with free food. Calling it a way to "pump up customers," the company expected to be handing out 4 million free Kuerig coffees and 2 million Christmas-themed cookies starting at 4 p.m. In-store Black Friday deals began at 6 p.m., but it wasn't customers' first crack at them: The chain began offering holiday bargains on Nov. 8.

Target opened its doors at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving ( same with Kohl's). In announcing its Black Friday plans, Target admonished customers to "head to the store after dinner."
- Nellie Bowles
Online shoppers, too, were busy on Thanksgiving Day. They shelled out $3.7 billion on Thursday, an increase of about 28 percent compared to last year, according to a report from Adobe Analytics, which tracks transactions from 80 of the country's top 100 online retailers.

And many of those online shoppers aren't heading to their desks or even grabbing their laptops. Thanksgiving marked the first day during which $1 billion in sales came from smartphones, Adobe said. And consumers spent more on their phones, with average order values up 8 percent compared with Thanksgiving Day last year.
- Zach Wichter

Social media is playing a bigger role than ever in people's holiday shopping habits. According to Accenture, 15 percent of shoppers in 2018 will use social media for some of their purchases, up from 8 percent last year. With a growing share of retail sales taking place online - and nearly half of those sales coming on mobile devices - social media might be a way for brands to counter the competition.

It could help retailers offset some of the deep discounts that consumers expect on Black Friday.

"If you can grab people in the inspirational moment, they're not going to be as price-sensitive and maybe they won't shop around," said Jill Standish, Accenture's global lead for retail.

Ms. Standish compared selling via social media to Amazon's 1-click ordering (something that, according to one survey, had 70 percent of respondents spending more money).

Another advantage? Online, Ms. Standish said, it can be easy "for a small brand to look big" if they know how to present themselves, and know how to attract the right influencer profiles to promote their products. A strong social media presence can make a company seem instantly reputable.
- Zach Wichter
There are three reasons that Black Friday is so popular, and two of them are the deals, according to Tulin Erdem, a marketing professor at New York University's Stern School of Business.

"The economic savings, feeling good about yourself having found a good deal, being a shrewd consumer," she said, all add up to one key factor. Plus, because so many stores offer Black Friday sales, it's easier to find discounts without having to search as hard as you might during the rest of the year.

But, Dr. Erdem said, another reason Black Friday remains so popular is tradition.

"It still has its appeal because of this ritualistic aspect," she said. "It's like going to a big important baseball game or Super Bowl as an American family."

[See how one family spent their Black Friday last year.]
Consider that the National Retail Federation surveyed 7,516 consumers about their shopping plans this year, and 26 percent of those who planned to shop on Black Friday said it was because of tradition. An additional 23 percent said they would shop because it's just something to do. (As far as we know, nobody was asked whether they're shopping just to get away from family members.)

Of course Black Friday is just the start of things. If retailers don't start discounting before Thanksgiving - and most seem to - they are certainly using the holiday shopping season to push merchandise at every turn. The biggest discounts tend to come on "Super Saturday" - the last Saturday before Christmas, said Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, a retail analysis firm.
- Zach Wichter
But Black Friday does matter. Consumers surveyed by the retail federation said they planned to shop more on Black Friday than on any other day of the Thanksgiving weekend.

And Black Friday maintains cultural cache, especially for "new Americans," said Mr. Johnson, as recent immigrants are more likely to take part. "That's how you learn to be an American consumer, by showing up and shopping on Black Friday."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Modest Horde Of Savvy Shoppers Descends Again For Black Friday. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Black Friday 2018: A Not-So-Wild Day for American Shoppers

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Here we are again: Mildly annoyed by the obvious consumerism, but totally in love with the deals. It must be Black Friday. The Friday after Thanksgiving is still the official start of the holiday shopping season, but things are changing.

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Module 7: The Importance of the Right CEO

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Module 7: The Importance of the Right CEO

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Reading this report reminded me of how crucial it is for firms to find the right leaders. The attainment of all organizational goals depend on this.

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Robert A. Sauerberg Jr. will continue as Condé Nast's chief executive until a successor is named, the company said. Credit Credit Steve Marcus/Reuters

Condé Nast, the once-flush publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and other magazines, is looking for a new business leader after years of losses.

The company said on Tuesday that its chief executive, Robert A. Sauerberg Jr., would step down after his successor was found. The announcement came months after Mr. Sauerberg announced a sweeping plan to address the struggles at Condé Nast.

A corporate restructuring will go along with the change in leadership. The next person to fill the top job will hold the title of global chief executive, a new position at the head of both Condé Nast and Condé Nast International. The two entities have historically operated as separate sister companies.

Last year, Condé Nast lost more than $120 million. It has put three magazines, Brides, Golf Digest and W, up for sale, and announced that it would end regular print publication of one of its oldest titles, Glamour.

In recent years, the magazine publisher has addressed declines in circulation and advertising by closing other magazines or reducing their frequency, laying off employees and leasing six floors of office space at its headquarters in 1 World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.

The troubles increased the pressure on Mr. Sauerberg. He was given a mandate to aggressively cut the company's losses, but failed to meet that target, said two people with knowledge of internal business matters who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.

The publisher did brisk business in the beginning of 2018, particularly from digital video, but hit a stumbling block in the third quarter, when the print editions of its magazines fell short of goals, the people said.

Condé Nast's September issues are especially important to the publisher's financial health. This time around, the once-dependable international fashion and luxury houses did not fatten the glossies with enough advertising to stem the bleeding. The company is expecting financial losses for this year, the people said.

Condé Nast was run for years by the publishing mogul S. I. Newhouse, who died last year, and has long been the glittering jewel of the Newhouse family empire. Its corporate parent, Advance Publications, is a privately held media company controlled by Mr. Newhouse's brother, Donald Newhouse, 89, and Donald's son, Steven O. Newhouse, 61.

As Mr. Sauerberg prepares to make his exit, Condé Nast International - also part of the Advance family - will take on new importance. A note sent to employees on Tuesday morning on behalf of the Condé Nast board said the company had been developing strategies to "meet the rapidly evolving media landscape," acknowledging that the industry "is increasingly becoming more global."

Based in London, Condé Nast International has had its own leadership team, with Jonathan Newhouse, 66, as the chief executive. A cousin of S. I. Newhouse, Jonathan will leave his post once the global chief executive is hired, and will become the chairman of the board, the company said.

While Condé Nast has struggled, its international counterpart, whose publications include British Vogue and Vanity Fair Italia, has thrived. One reason for its success is that print titles - on the wane in the United States - are still doing robust business in other parts of the world. The president of Condé Nast International, Wolfgang Blau, 50, is a rising star at the company; he joined as chief digital officer in 2015 and rose to his current position in 2017.
[Read more about Wolfgang Blau's tenure at Condé Nast International.]
The plan to combine the two publishing arms fits into the company's larger aim to cut costs and unify its advertising and content strategies. Having one lead account executive sell worldwide advertising for a single title could have certain advantages.

"Our brands have worldwide influence and impact, and our business is increasingly becoming more global," Steven and Jonathan Newhouse said in the memo to employees. "We have concluded that the time is right for us to combine our U.S. and international companies to realize the full potential of Condé Nast for our audiences and our business partners."

In what has proved to be a sign of things to come, Condé Nast said this year that it would merge the American and international versions of one of its magazines, Condé Nast Traveler. And much of the photo production, backstage videos, social media posts and other digital coverage of Fashion Week for international editions of Vogue will be centralized in London.

Condé Nast International, which the company says is profitable, has also embarked on an ambitious expansion, creating new editions of Vogue in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Greece and Hong Kong.

But combining the company's worldwide ambitions will be difficult, and the Newhouse family is seeking someone with experience running international businesses to replace Mr. Sauerberg. That makes it less likely that it will elevate someone from inside the company.

Mr. Blau, the Condé Nast International president, tried to calm any speculation that he was a contender for the job in a post on Twitter. "No, I will not move to New York and will not apply for the global CEO role," he said. "I am happy with what I am doing here and thankful for the opportunity to support our global growth and the future global CEO from here in London."

Mr. Sauerberg will leave the company after 13 years, less than three of them as chief executive. He will continue to represent Advance on the board of Reddit, the social media platform spun off by Condé Nast in 2011, the company said.

The belt-tightening and downsizing at Condé Nast seem out of kilter with its lavish image. Editorial budgets ballooned in the days when S. I. Newhouse was in charge. His mentor, the onetime editorial director of Condé Nast, Alexander Liberman, summed up the company's ethos when he said: "I believe in waste. Waste is very important in creativity."

Condé Nast editors like Diana Vreeland, Tina Brown, Anna Wintour and Graydon Carter became cultural arbiters, often traveling in the same circles as the people whose lives were chronicled in their pages. Ms. Wintour, the editor of Vogue, who has been the company's artistic director since 2013, has been not only a front-row fixture at fashion shows but something of a one-woman judge and jury for designers. And Mr. Carter, who was replaced last year as the editor of Vanity Fair by Radhika Jones, made his magazine practically synonymous with Hollywood glitter, thanks to the annual Oscars party.

But a recession and the rise of digital media led to a change in the company's identity. In recent years, it has hired consultants, who recommended cuts, and closed Details magazine, as well as the print versions of Self and Teen Vogue. Layoffs went along with the austerity program, and the company combined the photo and research departments of different magazines.

This year, trade publications and gossip columns were rife with speculation that Ms. Wintour was looking to leave. In an attempt to tamp down such talk in July, Condé Nast issued a statement from Mr. Sauerberg himself: "She is integral to the future of our company's transformation and has agreed to work with me indefinitely in her role as editor in chief, Vogue, and artistic director of Condé Nast," he said.

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Condé Nast, Its Luster Dimmed by Losses, Is Looking for a New Chief

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Condé Nast, the once-flush publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and other magazines, is looking for a new business leader after years of losses. The company said on Tuesday that its chief executive, Robert A. Sauerberg Jr., would step down after his successor was found.

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Module 7: Leading Organizations to Change

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Module 7: Leading Organizations to Change

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I found this to be an interesting take on what investors can do to bring about change in a corporation.

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How conscious investors can turn up the heat and make companies change | Vinay Shandal

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This classic TED talk presents a compelling view of motivation.

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The puzzle of motivation | Dan Pink | TED

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I love this cartoon because it suggests two things: That people can learn to become leaders, and that you have to do something to learn it.

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This tutorial gives a solid introduction to the topic of quality control in management.

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Module 8: Business Travelers Demand More from Hotels

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Module 8: Business Travelers Demand More from Hotels

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I found that this article illustrates how customers are the ultimate judges of a product's or a service's quality.

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Kirsten Garlitos at Glam & Go, an express salon at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, Calif. Glam & Go has plans to open several more hotel locations in 2019. Credit Credit Monica Almeida for The New York Times

Business travelers have long expected their hotels to provide good food, an array of fitness options and, perhaps, a place for a haircut or manicure. But lately, travelers have been pushing to speed up those services.

So hotels have started to introduce offerings like grab-and-go food outlets, short workouts and express beauty treatments. In many cases, the amenities are free or low cost.

"In an increasingly time-pressed environment, business travelers care more and more about fast and convenient hotel services," said Sean Hennessey, a hotel consultant and an assistant professor of hospitality at the Jonathan M. Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism at New York University.

That is in part because they are accustomed to instant gratification, he said. "They have access to so many services right through their cellphones, like food delivery and banking." That, he said, "translates into their work lives as well." But it is also the case that business travelers are more pressed for time because, he said, unlike previous generations, they're expected to be on call around the clock and respond to emails and other work requests immediately.

Scott Berman, the United States industry leader for hospitality and leisure at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said that the sped-up services come as hotels are competing more intensely for the loyalty of business travelers. According to the Global Business Travel Association, total spending on business travel in the United States reached $292.3 billion in 2017, a 3.1 percent increase from the year before.

"Business travelers," Mr. Berman said, "are spending more, but they have so many hotels to pick from, and they want the properties that give them efficiency and value."

Much of the new focus on speed emphasizes exercise, and that may be because working out is a priority for many business travelers. In a recent survey of 16,000 business travelers, the travel technology company Travelport found that nearly two-thirds said they were more likely to stay at a hotel that offered a robust lineup of fitness options.

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Glam & Go's owner, Erika Wasser, said that the salons are busiest in the morning when female business travelers get their hair blown out before work. Credit Monica Almeida for The New York Times

To that end, several hotels have recently introduced free fitness programs that provide more choices. Hotel RL, a brand with eight domestic hotels, for example, started a partnership in October with the audio fitness app Aaptiv that gives guests free access to more than 2,500 workouts - most 20 minutes or less - that range from yoga to outdoor running to strength training. Guests get a code when they check in that they can use to download Aaptiv on their phones; the app usually costs $14.99 a month, but they can keep using it for five days after they check out.

Hotel RL's senior vice president of global brand management and strategy, Yvonne Choi, said the company had teamed up with Aaptiv because its guests were saying they wanted more ways to exercise efficiently. "We tried to find a creative and fun way to give them what they were asking for," she said.

Also in October, Hyatt Place introduced a partnership with the spa and fitness company Exhale to bring free on-demand meditation, strength and interval routines to in-room televisions in its 136 domestic hotels. The routines come in various lengths, including under 10 minutes, 15 to 20 minutes, and 20 to 30 minutes. Some require fitness bands, which the property's front desk staff has on hand and lends to guests.

Dream Hotels, with five properties in the United States, is starting fitness initiatives at several of its locations. Its Hollywood property begins a collaboration in January with the celebrity personal trainer Gunnar Peterson, who is designing a series of seven-minute workouts that will be illustrated on a card and delivered to guests as a turndown amenity each night.

The Dream property in the meatpacking district in Manhattan has a new partnership with the yoga and Pilates instructor Melissa Wood-Tepperberg to bring on-demand workouts, ranging from 20 to 30 minutes, to in-room televisions.

Danielle Kam, an East Village resident who works for the dating site Tinder, said she did two of these routines when she stayed at the hotel in early November for a work-related research project. "I like core workouts but can get lazy about doing them, but here, I was able to roll out of bed and get them done in 20 minutes," she said.

Short beauty services are another new service at some hotels. Nine properties domestically, including Fairmont Miramar Hotel & Bungalows, in Santa Monica, Calif., and Loews Miami Beach, have opened outposts of the blow-dry bar Glam & Go in the last few years.

All the salons open at 7 a.m. and offer 15-minute express blowouts for $25 that stylists do without wetting the hair and 30-minute ones with a shampoo and conditioner for $45. (Several more hotel locations will open in 2019, including at the Dream Hollywood in January.) Glam & Go's owner, Erika Wasser, said that the salons are busiest in the morning when female business travelers get blow dries before work.

A fast casual food outlet, the Market, in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency Chicago. The hotel chain opened the shops at 41 properties in the fall; 11 of them are open 24 hours. Credit Nolis Anderson for The New York Times

Marisa DiLemme, a record label lawyer from Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, goes to Glam & Go in Santa Monica when she's in Los Angeles and books both the express and 30-minute blowouts.

"I'm in the entertainment industry and always going to events where I need to look polished," she said. "I love how quickly I can get a blow dry at Glam & Go without feeling ripped off."

Manicures and massages are part of the speedier beauty services, too. Edgewood Tahoe, in Stateline, Nev., has a new spa that offers a 25-minute express manicure for $25 where nail technicians shape, buff and polish the fingernails and do a hand massage. And the spa at Portola Hotel & Spa, in Monterey, Calif., has several beauty treatments that take less than 25 minutes, including a 20-minute foot soak and massage for $55.

Hotels are also starting to offer an option other than room service, which can be a costly proposition and not the ideal way to get a quick meal. Instead, they're opening grab-and-go outlets that serve tasty food at reasonable prices.

The Viceroy Snowmass, in Colorado, which serves a significant number of business travelers, opened a coffee shop, Café V, in its lobby this summer that serves hot and cold coffee drinks, pastries baked at the hotel, and granola and panini.

"A good portion of our business travelers communicated to us that they didn't want to wait around for a long breakfast or lunch before or in between meetings," said Robert Purdy, the hotel's general manager.

Late last year, Hyatt Regency opened a fast casual food outlet, the Market, in the lobbies of a handful of its domestic properties and rolled it out to 41 locations this fall; 11 are open 24 hours a day. While the menus vary by property, all have salads, regional specialties like beignets at the New Orleans property and made-to-order portable meals like personal-size pizzas.

Gary D. Mote, a program manager from Hartselle, Ala., is a frequent guest at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta and said he discovered the Market on a work trip there this year. He has become a loyal customer and said he was a fan of its chicken potpies for dinner and doughnuts for breakfast, which he picks up at 5 a.m. on the way to the airport to catch his flight back home.

And then there are the warm chocolate chip cookies that he often gets cravings for at 2 a.m. "I love being able to walk down to the lobby and getting exactly what I want for a few dollars without having to wait," he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Plane to Catch? Try Our Turbo Manicure. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Always in a Rush, Business Travelers Push for Even Speedier Hotel Services

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Business travelers have long expected their hotels to provide good food, an array of fitness options and, perhaps, a place for a haircut or manicure. But lately, travelers have been pushing to speed up those services. So hotels have started to introduce offerings like grab-and-go food outlets, short workouts and express beauty treatments.

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Module 8: Quality Control in Living Cells

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Module 8: Quality Control in Living Cells

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I find it fascinating that the concept of quality control extends from management theory to the molecular workings of living cells.

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Researchers have identified the key molecular players in the decisions cells make about whether to scrap or salvage misfolded proteins.

Proteins are the workhorses of our cells, carrying out essential tasks to keep our cells-and our bodies-functioning properly. But proteins can only do their jobs if they fold into the right shape.

When a protein misfolds, the cell can try to salvage the situation by refolding the protein or destroying it, but how cells make that decision has been a mystery.

In a study in , Judith Frydman and her team identified the key molecular players in this decision.

Frydman, a professor of biology at Stanford University, sees this basic knowledge as the first step toward treating many human diseases, including neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and cancers that sometimes result when a cell fails to eliminate misfolded proteins.

"We need to understand how cells make this decision at the molecular level before we can develop cures," she says. "But first we had to define the components and pathways."

'Quality control sweet spot'

The trick is finding the right balance between eliminating bad proteins and salvaging what's fixable.

"The cell needs to find a quality control sweet spot where it degrades the misfolded proteins to keep them from accumulating and being toxic but isn't too zealous in degrading everything-including proteins that can still function," Frydman says.

After about a decade of work, Frydman and her team found how the cell determines where that sweet spot lies. The responsibility resides with two groups of proteins-called ubiquitin ligases and molecular chaperones-that work together to decide what to do about misfolded proteins.

The ubiquitin ligases stick a variety of branched ubiquitin chains to specific locations on the misfolded proteins. Depending on the location and type of tags, the cell decides whether to destroy or re-fold.

Both groups of proteins are known to play other roles in the cell, but this is the first evidence that they have a dual role in targeting misfolded proteins.

"Molecular chaperones, much like human chaperones, help newly made or otherwise immature proteins attain their mature, functional state," Frydman says. "I was surprised that chaperones also form part of the decision to degrade a misfolded protein."

Differing quality standards

While studying how cells determine which misfolded proteins to destroy, the team noticed something strange: the selection processes differed in the cytoplasm, the main compartment of the cell, and the nucleus, where the cell's DNA resides.

"We think this reflects the different requirements for how stringent protein quality control has to be," Frydman says. In the cytoplasm-where newly created proteins are in the process of folding-cells would try not to degrade proteins prematurely. Cells might lower the bar for destroying misfolded proteins in the nucleus, to avoid them interfering with important genetic information.

Frydman and her team are still curious about how cells decide what to do with misfolded proteins in different parts of the cell, but their new findings have laid the foundation to answer questions like these.

"This basic knowledge establishes a new principle that will allow us to think about this important question of protein quality control in healthy cells but also during disease, both fundamentally and from the point of view of therapeutics," she says.

The Human Frontier Science Program and the National Institutes of Health funded the work.
Source: Sofie Bates for Stanford University

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How cells do 'quality control' for misfolded proteins - Futurity

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Researchers have identified the key molecular players in the decisions cells make about whether to scrap or salvage misfolded proteins. Proteins are the workhorses of our cells, carrying out essential tasks to keep our cells-and our bodies-functioning properly. But proteins can only do their jobs if they fold into the right shape.

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This is a simple but helpful reminder of where the Lean Six Sigma methodology comes from.

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Finally, here is a simple diagram of the features of a production management system.