The Brief
These articles come from the RelSci 5, our weekly newsletter for and about organizational leaders. Its curated articles and insights revolve around a different theme each week and will help you do your job better. Choose the email you want: Business, Finance or Nonprofit.
These articles come from the RelSci 5, our weekly newsletter for and about organizational leaders. Its curated articles and insights revolve around a different theme each week and will help you do your job better. Choose the email you want: Business, Finance or Nonprofit.
1. The new executive: Elizabeth Holmes.
Making a pretty strong case for the importance of relationships to bizdev, 30-year-old Stanford dropout—and world’s youngest self-made female billionaire—Elizabeth Holmes has raised over $400 million so far for her blood-testing tech company, Theranos (currently valued at $9 billion). So how’d she get there? Well, first, Holmes counts people like Henry Kissinger and former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry as board members. With their guidance and her smarts, she could be poised to disrupt a $75 billion marketplace.
+ Holmes Profile: Who else from her network can Holmes leverage to start the disruption?
2. The case against remote employees.
Don’t be a martyr. And don’t enable (or expect) your employees to be martyrs, either. Facetime isn’t just important for resolving office disputes; Americans need to be doing more of it socially, and that means getting out of the cubicle. Work-hours in the U.S. are skyrocketing out of control, and it’s not just bad for family life–it’s bad for business. Here’s how to get your employees out of the office, even if they don’t want to leave.
3. The end of the Nook?
Nearly three years into the joint endeavor between Microsoft and Barnes & Noble to develop and produce the Nook tablet, the tech giant has pulled out of its relationship with the book dealer. Having lost the battle of the tablets to Amazon and Apple (not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars), Barnes & Noble will buy back Microsoft’s stake, and the latter will be free to concentrate on its own tablet offering, the Surface.
Our burning questions:
With Nook revenues down by over 41 percent in the last quarter, but traditional book sales slightly up, how will Barnes & Noble allocate its resources going forward?
Amazon and Apple might have beaten the Nook, but overall, tablet sales are down. What does the “massive deceleration” of the tablet market in 2014 mean for these big brands?
RelSci is a technology solutions company that helps create competitive advantage for organizations through a crucial yet vastly underutilized asset: relationship capital with influential decision makers.
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