Entrepreneur Rothblatt Was Highest-Paid Female CEO in 2013

(p. 3) Martine Rothblatt, a serial entrepreneur, has a unique perspective on female 1 percenters. She not only founded Sirius Satellite Radio, but also founded and serves as chief executive of United Therapeutics, a pharmaceuticals company. Ms. Rothblatt was the highest-paid female chief executive in the country in 2013, with compensation of $38 million, yet she does not see her success as a victory for women. She was born as Martin and underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1994.
“I’ve only been a woman for half of my life, and there’s no doubt that I’ve benefited hugely from being a guy,” she told Fortune magazine.
In an interview, Ms. Rothblatt had some surprising suggestions for helping women reach the top. She supports eliminating “say on pay” rules that allow shareholders to vote on executive compensation, and eliminating shareholder advisory groups. “If shareholders do not like the pay a woman is receiving as C.E.O., they should simply sell the stock, and vice versa,” she said.

For the full commentary, see:
ROBERT FRANK. “INSIDE WEALTH; Plenty of Billionaires, but Few Are Women.” The New York Times, Sunday Business Section (Sun., Jan. 1, 2017): 3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 30, 2016, and has the title “INSIDE WEALTH; Why Aren’t There More Female Billionaires?”)

Music Cassettes Still Thrive

(p. D11) . . . thanks to music fans who are rediscovering the format’s appeal–whether the ability to craft heartfelt mixtapes or the comfort of having tangible music–cassettes are making a comeback. Sales figures for streaming music and even vinyl may dwarf those of cassettes, but the format still thrives: An estimated 129,000 tapes sold last year, up from 74,000 the year before, according to Nielsen Music.
Blame the resurgence, in part, on Justin Bieber. So says Gigi Johnson, director of UCLA’s Center for Music Innovation. When the heartthrob released a cassette version of his Grammy-nominated album “Purpose” in 2016, more than 1,000 copies of the retro iteration sold (a relatively significant sum). The Weeknd’s Grammy-winning release “Beauty Behind the Madness” saw similar sales in cassette form, as did over 20 other albums last year, including the “Guardians of the Galaxy” soundtrack and reissues of works by Prince and Eminem.
Although four-digit sales figures might seem paltry, Ms. Johnson deemed 2016 “a breakout year” for cassettes. “You can expect to see many more artists embracing tapes this year and next,” she said.
. . .
“I keep waiting for this to be a fad that will fade out,” said Ms. Johnson of UCLA. “But we’re almost a decade into this and it keeps growing.”

For the full story, see:
NATHAN OLIVAREZ-GILES. “GEAR & GADGETS; Can’t Stop the Music.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 11, 2017): D11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 9, 2017, and has the title “GEAR & GADGETS; Why Cassette Tapes Are Making a Comeback.”)

Most “Small Firms Do Not Innovate”

(p. A11) The neglect of small businesses stems in part from the sense that they aren’t very dynamic–that in contrast with startups, they don’t really grow or change from year to year. In a 2011 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Erik Hurst and Benjamin Wild Pugsley of the University of Chicago found that most of the people running these companies are content to stay small and continue offering the same kinds of products or services as competitors.
“Most firms start small and stay small throughout their entire lifecycle,” they write. “Also, most surviving small firms do not innovate along any observable margin.”
Profs. Ruback and Yudkoff are challenging that attitude. Their argument is that well-trained and energetic new managers can bring process innovations to these businesses that can fundamentally alter their trajectories. In many cases, the firms purchased by Harvard Business School graduates have begun hiring and growing. The alumni who are running them can make a good living today–and potentially see very good returns in the future, if and when they sell their better-run, more-profitable firm at a premium.

For the full commentary, see:
NITIN NOHRIA. “Appreciating the Big Role of Small Businesses.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 3, 2016): A11.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 2, 2016,)

The published version of the Hurst and Pugsley paper mentioned above, is:
Hurst, Erik, and Benjamin Wild Pugsley. “What Do Small Businesses Do?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity Issue 2 (Fall 2011): 73-118.

Walt Disney “Tossed Out the Corporate Playbook”

(p. 4) Here is something that might surprise you: Walt Disney, that icon of American ingenuity, was in financial straits through most of his career. You probably thought he would have been a business genius — a model for others to study. But Disney was an atrocious businessman, constantly running his company into the ground. At the same time, though, he was a corporate visionary whose aversion to typical business practices led to the colossus that the Walt Disney Company became.
. . .
Disney could have expanded the company steadily, building on the success of Mickey Mouse. Instead, he placed a huge and highly risky bet on feature animation. “Snow White” was four years in production and cost over $2 million ($33.5 million in today’s dollars), most of it borrowed from Bank of America against the receipts of the cartoon shorts. The gamble paid off. “Snow White” earned nearly $7 million ($117 million today), most of which he immediately sank into a new studio headquarters in Burbank, Calif., and a slate of features.
. . .
He didn’t care one whit about money. Even his wife, Lillian, complained that she didn’t understand why he didn’t have more of it. After all, she said, he was Walt Disney. Had he not been the studio’s creative force, had the studio not been so closely identified with him, he almost certainly would have been ousted. As it was, both the bankers and his brother pressured him to rein in his ambitions and compromise on the quality of his films.
. . .
And though Disney’s capriciousness and constant reinvention of his company drove his brother and others crazy, it also kept re-energizing the Disney studio and led, in 1955, to Disneyland — a triumph that at last put the company on solid financial footing. Not incidentally, Disneyland sprang from another of Disney’s beliefs: that it was hard to wring greatness from a bureaucracy. He and his team designed the park as a separate entity from the studio, WED Enterprises.
None of this would have been possible without Roy Disney’s understanding that his primary job was to realize his brother’s dreams. He was the businessman whom Disney needed to deal with other businessmen. Walt Disney, at his core, was an artist who tossed out the corporate playbook and operated, as artists usually do, by inspiration. In the end, the company flourished precisely because Disney was such an indifferent businessman.

For the full commentary, see:
NEAL GABLER. “A Visionary Who Was Crazy Like a Mouse.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., SEPT. 13, 2015): 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date SEPT. 12, 2015, and has the title “Walt Disney, a Visionary Who Was Crazy Like a Mouse.”)

Some of what Gabler discusses in the commentary quoted above, is also discussed in his biography of Disney:
Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

U.S. Science Agencies Omit Margin of Error in Warming Stats

(p. A13) The year 2016 was the warmest ever recorded–so claimed two U.S. agencies, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Except it wasn’t, according to the agencies’ own measures of statistical uncertainty.
Such fudge is of fairly recent vintage. Leaving any discussion of the uncertainty interval out of press releases only became the norm in the second year of the Obama administration. Back when he was presenting the 2008 numbers, NASA’s James Hansen, no slouch in raising climate alarms, nevertheless made a point of being quoted saying such annual rankings can be “misleading because the difference in temperature between one year and another is often less than the uncertainty in the global average.”
Statisticians wouldn’t go through the trouble of assigning an uncertainty value unless it meant something. Two measurements separated by less than the margin of error are the same. And yet NASA’s Goddard Institute, now under Mr. Hansen’s successor Gavin Schmidt, put out a release declaring 2014 the “warmest year in the modern record” when it was statistically indistinguishable from 2005 and 2010.
. . .
. . . other countries like the U.K. and Japan also do sophisticated monitoring and end up with findings roughly similar to the findings of U.S. agencies, yet they don’t feel the need to lie about it. For instance, the U.K. Met Office headlined its 2016 report “one of the warmest two years on record.” A reader only had to progress to the third paragraph to discover that the difference over 2015 was one-tenth the margin of error.

For the full commentary, see:
HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. “Change Would Be Healthy at U.S. Climate Agencies; In the Obama era, it was routine for press releases to avoid mentioning any margin of error..” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Feb. 4, 2017): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Founder Movie Is Unfair to Entrepreneur Ray Kroc

(p. 1D) McDonald’s franchise owner Jim Darmody of Omaha notes that the Hollywood film about Ray Kroc doesn’t always put the self-proclaimed “founder” of the fast-food chain in a good light.
“The movie makes it seem like he stole something from the McDonald brothers,” Darmody said. “But I can’t fault him. He bought it from the brothers and made it a dynasty.”
. . .
(p. 3D) Ray Kroc not only made a fortune that his wife turned into philanthropy, Jim said, but also created opportunities for people like himself.
. . .
Darmody said the McDonald’s Corp. has an excellent inspection program at stores for consistency and cleanliness.
Communities, he said, also have benefited from the presence of McDonald’s.
Kroc died in 1984. His widow, Joan Kroc, who died in 2003, left her $1.5 billion estate to charity.
. . .
. . . in a 1993 phone interview, Dick McDonald told me that he and his brother had no regrets about selling to Kroc for what later seemed a pittance.
“Neither of us had any youngsters who would go into the business,” said Dick, who had come up with the idea for golden arches. “I guess we could have stayed and piled up millions. But as my brother once said, ‘What can we do with $40 million that we can’t do with three or four million — except pay a lot of taxes?’ ”
. . .
Darmody, who has flipped a few burgers, said he learned some things from the movie, including how the brothers came up with the speedy production system. But without Kroc, he said, McDonald’s wouldn’t be what it is today.

For the full story, see:
Michael Kelly. “Following in the Footsteps of Founder.” Omaha World-Herald (Thurs., March 2, 2017): 1D & 3D.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Mach 4 [sic], 2017, and has the title “Kelly: McDonald’s franchise owner in Omaha says ‘founder’ Ray Kroc created opportunities for people.”)

How Uber Resisted Regulation

(p. B1) Uber Technologies Inc. has for years employed a program that uses data from its ride-hailing app and other tools to evade government officials seeking to identify and block the service’s drivers, according to a person familiar with the matter.
. . .
Uber has set up GPS rings around government offices, tracked low-cost phones and looked for other clues that regulators were targeting its drivers, such as frequently opening or closing the app or using credit cards tied to city agencies, according to the Times report. Once identified, Uber kept regulators out of vehicles by failing to send drivers their way, according to the newspaper.

For the full story, see:
GREG BENSINGER. “Uber Used Program to Evade Authorities.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., March 6, 2017): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 4, 2017, and has the title “Uber Used ‘Greyball’ Program to Circumvent Authorities.” )

Lenin Sought to Enserf the Soul

(p. B11) Mr. Navrozov’s contempt for Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Stalin, his brutal successor, arose out of intellectual loathing, not of a personal history of exile or repression. In his book, “The Education of Lev Navrozov: A Life in the Enclosed World Once Called Russia” (1975), he described Lenin as a “barbarian” unworthy of his country’s deification.
“He had to enserf every soul psychologically,” he wrote. “He had to destroy inside every soul all the psychology of independence that had been accumulating throughout the history of Russia.”
The book, which was partly autobiographical, was praised by the philosopher Sidney Hook and the historian Robert K. Massie.
. . .
. . . , Saul Bellow, in his novel “More Die of Heartbreak” (1987), placed Mr. Navrozov among the dissident writers Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Maximov and Andrei Sinyavsky as “commanding figures, men of genius, some of them.”
. . .
. . . , [Navrozov] cautioned that the Affordable Care Act was reminiscent of Soviet-socialized medicine. “Obamacare will destroy the delicate fabric of existing free-market medical services,” he wrote in 2012 on Newsmax.

For the full obituary, see:
RICHARD SANDOMIR. “Lev Navrozov, Literary Translator and Soviet Dissident, Dies at 88.” The New York Times (Tues., FEB. 14, 2017): B11.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added; italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date FEB. 9, 2017.)

The Navrozov book mentioned above, is:
Navrozov, Lev. The Education of Lev Navrozov: A Life in the Closed World Once Called Russia. New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1975.

Two Die from Listeria in Artisanal Cheese

(p. A19) Two people have died following an outbreak of listeria linked to a popular artisanal raw milk cheese made in upstate New York, the authorities said this week.
The deaths occurred in Vermont and Connecticut, local officials said. Four other people in New York and Florida reported feeling sick after eating Ouleout, the artisanal cheese, which is produced by Vulto Creamery in Walton, N.Y.
. . .
Ouleout has been celebrated across the United States as much for its unusual back story as for its flavor: It was created by Jos Vulto, a Dutch artist linked to the Museum of Modern Art, who started making cheese in his apartment and aging it under a sidewalk in Brooklyn.
. . .
Mr. Vulto came to the United States from the Netherlands in 1990, according to several media outlets specializing in cheese. He spent two years as an artist-in-residence at P.S. 1 in Queens, a contemporary art institution affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He specialized in crafting abstract installations made of metal.
His specialty involved “wrapping empty buildings in cloth and building contained fires of sawdust and hay inside,” according to Culture Cheese Mag. When the building started to emit smoke, the cloth absorbed an imprint of the building. Mr. Vulto called the technique “rooking,” a play on the Dutch word for smoke.
In 2008, Mr. Vulto switched to cheese making, reportedly inspired by the stink caused by a carton of soured milk in his refrigerator. He began creating rudimentary cheese in his apartment, and gradually mastered the art by making and remaking new batches and studying techniques.

For the full story, see:
KIMIKO de FREYTAS-TAMURA. “Two People Die after Eating Raw Milk Cheese.” The New York Times (Sat., MARCH 11, 2017): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 10, 2017, and has the title “Two People Die after Eating Raw Milk Cheese Made in New York State.” The last sentence in the next-to-last paragraph quoted above, appears in the online, but not in the print, version of the article.)

British Government Environmentalists Increase London Air Pollution

(p. A4) London is choking from record levels of pollution, much of it caused by diesel cars and trucks, as well as wood-burning fires in private homes, a growing trend.
. . .
London’s air pollution today is different from seven decades ago, and more insidious. No longer thick as “pea soup,” as it was traditionally described, the city’s air is now laced with nitrogen dioxide — a toxic gas mostly produced by vehicles with diesel engines.
. . .
The current problem is, in part, an unintended consequence of previous efforts to aid the environment.
The British government provided financial incentives to encourage a shift to diesel engines because laboratory tests suggested that would cut harmful emissions and combat climate change. Yet, it turned out that diesel cars emit on average five times as much emissions in real-world driving conditions as in the tests, according to a British Department for Transport study.
“No one at the time thought of the consequences of increased nitrogen dioxide emissions from diesel, and the policy of incentivizing diesel was so successful that an awful lot of people bought diesel cars,” said Anna Heslop, a lawyer at ClientEarth, an environmental law firm that last year forced the British government to produce a better plan to improve air quality.
. . .
Bob Miller, 69, a cabdriver who has crisscrossed London for 30 years, wasn’t convinced. He has lost faith in recommendations by policy makers and experts, he said.
“We were told how wonderful diesel is, how they were supposed to be cleaner than petrol,” Mr. Miller said, idling his cab in heavy traffic with the window open.
“The experts make the rules, then they’re wrong,” he said, shaking his head. “I give up.”

For the full story, see:
KIMIKO de FREYTAS-TAMURA. “A Push for Diesel Leaves London Gasping Amid Record Pollution.” The New York Times (Sat., FEB. 18, 2017): A4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 17, 2017.)

U.S. Forest Service Killed “Prometheus,” World’s Oldest Tree

(p. D9) Great Basin’s . . . big draw–trees about as old as Egyptian hieroglyphics–sits at the top of the sky island in Wheeler Peak Bristlecone Grove.
. . .
At the grove, a stand of weather-battered bristlecone pines await, just as they have for between 3,000 and 4,000 years. With their knobby trunks and gnarled branches, the trees look like characters in an animated film’s enchanted forest, ready to burst into song. They often have only a small strip of bark, with the rest of the trunk bare, exposing the smooth, rich browns, yellows and grays in its fine grain.
At one time the oldest known tree in the world lived here. Its dignified appearance earned it the name Prometheus. In 1964, two decades before Great Basin became a national park, a researcher, trying to collect data about the area’s climate history, drilled into defenseless Prometheus (not knowing its exact age) to examine its rings. When his coring instrument got stuck, the Forest Service felled the tree to retrieve his tool– only to discover that the tree was 4,900 years old.
Oops.

For the full story, see:
JIM ROBBINS. “In a Strange Land; One of the country’s least-hyped nature preserves, Nevada’s Great Basin National Park has a weird, wild beauty all its own.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MARCH 11, 2017): D9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 9, 2017, and has the title “A Hike Through America’s Otherworldly Outback.”)