I recently left the corporate world. After working roughly 20 years in mega-large companies with revenues in the billions I am now a company of one. It’s me and only me.
I do all my own stunts, too. Whether it’s booking travel or sending invoices or writing reports, there is no one to lean on, no one to manage. If I’m being truthful, I’m really enjoying life in my company of one.
Which brings me to Paul Jarvis, author of the fantastic book, Company of One.
The premise is simple. Keeping your business small—versus growing it at all costs—brings you a level of sanity and independence. Growth is not the objective; building something slowly and methodically that is “remarkable and resilient” over the long-term is the name of the game.
In summary, staying small is the next big thing for business.
I spent the last three days talking to dozens of people about pooping.
The ease with which I can discuss the act of defecation is somewhat of a paradox — because I am exceedingly bathroom shy. Silent office restrooms with stall doors that end a foot and a half off the ground are my worst enemy, while the best workspace toilet experience I’ve ever had was, oddly, at a WeWork, where the barriers were floor to ceiling, there was always music playing, and each stall came equipped with its own bottle of air freshener spray.
Yet such restrooms are rare. In the United States, at least, we’re far more likely to encounter cramped, quiet bathrooms with terrible two-ply toilet paper and dribble on the seat. Even at home, where our bathrooms are typically more comfortable than what you’ll find at the mall or an office building, we’re limited to a basic setup: a plain porcelain bowl, with maybe two flush settings, beside a roll of whatever toilet paper you’re willing to invest in. God help you if you run out.
“Imagine a world where you only need to wipe once”
But it doesn’t have to be this way! All over the world, restrooms are blessed with more humane configurations. In some places, they come equipped with hoses so the user can more easily cleanse themselves after use. In others, such as France, bathrooms have bidets which perform the same function as the hose, only hands-free. And in some regions of Asia, most notably Japan, high-tech toilets with sound effects, heated seats, several bidet functions, and air dryers are as ubiquitous as automatic faucets, as Jane, a New York-based freelance calligrapher who lived in the Kagawa region of Japan for four years and requested that only her first name be used, told me.
Where did you find your last boyfriend or girlfriend, and the one behind that? Did they catch your eye while strolling through a park? Or did you find them perched on the edge of a barstool, sipping a Manhattan? Were you introduced through friends? Or was it a meet-cute situation?
Yeah, right. You know you totally met them online – on a dating website after filling out a meticulous profile, or just swiping right. A new study from Stanford sociologist and lead author Michael Rosenfeld shows that most heterosexual couples today meet on the internet (or smartphone). His research was just published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The world’s largest bicycle parking facility in Utrecht, the Netherlands. (Photo via CU2030/City of Utrecht)
UTRECHT, Netherlands (CN) – When your country has more bikes than people, you need somewhere to park them all.
On Monday, the Dutch city of Utrecht opened the world’s largest bicycle parking facility. The Netherlands has a population of 18 million people but 23 million bicycles.
Located beneath the central train station in the country’s fourth-largest city, the Stationsplein bicycle parking can hold 12,656 bikes. The previous record was held by Tokyo, Japan, which has a facility that can hold 9,400 bikes.
Ricky Lopez owns four restaurants: Top Round Roast Beef in San Francisco and three that exist only within the Uber Eats delivery app.CreditCreditCayce Clifford for The New York Times
Food delivery apps are reshaping the restaurant industry — and how we eat — by inspiring digital-only establishments that don’t need a dining room or waiters.
SAN FRANCISCO — At 9:30 on most weeknights, Ricky Lopez, the head chef and owner of Top Round Roast Beef in San Francisco, stacks up dozens of hot beef sandwiches and sides of curly fries to serve hungry diners.
He also breads chicken cutlets for another of his restaurants, Red Ribbon Fried Chicken. He flips beef patties on the grill for a third, TR Burgers and Wings. And he mixes frozen custard for a dessert shop he runs, Ice Cream Custard.
Of Mr. Lopez’s four operations, three are “virtual restaurants” with no physical storefronts, tables or chairs. They exist only inside a mobile app, Uber Eats, the on-demand meal delivery service owned by Uber.
“Wealth work” is one of America’s fastest-growing industries. That’s not entirely a good thing.
In an age of persistently high inequality, work in high-cost metros catering to the whims of the wealthy—grooming them, stretching them, feeding them, driving them—has become one of the fastest-growing industries.
The MIT economist David Autor calls it “wealth work.”
Low-skill, low-pay, and disproportionately done by women, these jobs congregate near dense urban labor markets, multiplying in neighborhoods with soaring disposable income. Between 2010 and 2017, the number of manicurists and pedicurists doubled, while the number of fitness trainers and skincare specialists grew at least twice as fast as the overall labor force.
Many of the nation’s current pathologies are taking a heavy toll on the majority-white population living in rural America, which was severely impacted by the opioid crisis and has dealt with falling populations, job losses and rising suicide rates.
Why it matters: The malaise and discontent that President Trump has tapped into goes beyond the racism we’ve seen over the past few weeks and includes anger at a changing world and frustration at dwindling opportunities close to home. These trends are further entrenching the rural-urban schism that came to light in the 2016 election.
The big picture: Political and economic power is shifting to the cities, and 20% of the population — 46 million people — is being left behind in the middle of America. These communities face increasingly difficult barriers to education, wealth and health.
New research shows that one in 10 of them over 65 engages in college-style drinking behavior
Binge drinking is often portrayed as a college thing. But this risky form of imbibing actually declined among U.S. university students from 2005 to 2014. It is now most prevalent among people from 25 to 34 and is increasing among people over 50. And new research finds that 10.6% of seniors 65 and older are binge drinkers — though the actual total is almost surely higher.
Kimchi, K-pop, and K-dramas. Welcome to Hallyu 2.0, in which everyone in the West is losing their minds over all things Korean.
Playing a starring role is a glorious onslaught of Korean beauty products, with the K-Beauty market now valued at over $13 billion, and $7.2 billion of which is from facial skin care alone. Serums, acids, oils, cushion compacts, CC creams, BB creams, masks that bubble on your face, masks to sleep in, volcanic clay, and snail slime are seeing improbably explosive popularity, and they’ve done so with accessible pricing and cute packaging that has grown women reaching for panda face masks.
“What people don’t see is the amount of government support and PR that drives interest.”
Jude Chao, director of marketing for BeautyTap and somewhat of an oracle on K-Beauty (who also happens to have excellent skin) believes in empowering the masses with education on K-Beauty ingredients. (Her blog, Fifty Shades of Snail, is a solid starting point if you’re overwhelmed by the 12,000 active brands on the market, the proliferation of which Chao believes is no coincidence.)
The Moxy Chelsea in New York City. Though their rooms are small, microhotels often have spacious lobbies that invite hanging out and co-working.
They appeal to senior citizens and millennials, business travelers and backpackers. And they’re particularly attractive to hotel developers, who can pack in more guest rooms than in a typical hotel.
They’re known as microhotels, inspired by the Japanese capsule or pod hotels of 40 years ago that offered cheap, tiny accommodations to businessmen.
The new versions — which are most common in but not exclusive to big, expensive cities like New York, London and Paris — are designed, as one hotel expert put it, down to their last square inch. Their guest rooms are small — often half, or less, the size of a typical room in an urban hotel — with furniture that often can be folded up or stowed away, and bathrooms that usually have showers and toilets but no bathtubs. Wall-mounted TVs are also major space savers.
In only a decade, hiring, culture, workforce distribution, and customer preferences all will look dramatically different.
Some business trends go the way of Formica tables, as we learn in study after study (open office layouts, we’re looking at you). But others evolve as the world develops, and those trends are the ones that demand a complete work overhaul. Educator and author Josh Levine, who has spent the past 15 years helping companies grow culture-driven brands, has done the legwork to pinpoint the top 10 upcoming trends worth your attention.
Through its multiple partnerships with EV startups, the company is precipitating a sustainable transformation in the delivery industry.
A new UPS truck now rolling around the streets of London looks like an ordinary delivery vehicle. But at night, the truck plugs into a new smart grid at the company’s hub in the center of the city, where it pulls in enough charge to drive up to 150 miles the next day.
The smart grid and the battery infrastructure inside the truck are made by the U.K.-based startup Arrival. They will soon fully debut in a pilot fleet of custom trucks equipped with other features, including a wraparound front window that makes it easier for a driver to see other vehicles and pedestrians. This pilot is just one piece of UPS’ larger experimentation with electric vehicles.
