Currencies: While the euro zone squabbled, the pound looked awfully good

CIA officer who is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, in an e-mail. Yet it reaches only a small number of militants and falls short of “dealing in a more wholesale manner with the roots of jihadi radicalism in the kingdom,” he wrote. The authorities work with Sunni clerics to help deter young Saudis from going on jihad, train the police to identify and arrest returning jihadis, and try to disrupt the financial networks supporting them.

More than 2,600 Saudis have traveled to Syria since 2011 to fight for militant groups such as Islamic State, and 668 have returned, according to the Ministry of the Interior. Many end up in al-Ha’ir or other top- security prisons. So do Saudis who funded, recruited, and housed the fighters. The number of inmates at the maximum-security prisons now exceeds 4,200, according to official figures. That number includes jihadis and others, such as rebellious Saudi Shiites, who are deemed enemies of the state. All the inmates at al-Ha’ir get a monthly allowance of 2,000 riyals ($533), which they can withdraw from ATMs in the prison, and they have opportunities for education and access to psychologists. “The main purpose is to rehabilitate them,” says Colonel Mohammed “Abu Salman,” the head of al-Ha’ir. For security reasons the colonel gives his nickname only.

In a courtyard inside al-Ha’ir, young men, all jihadis, sit on benches talking. One says he’s a Saudi American from Texas, giving no further details. Another says he fought six months with a group linked to Islamic State in Aleppo. He says he headed home when he grew worried about his family and was arrested when he landed at the airport in Jeddah. In al-Ha’ir’s medical ward, a 25-year-old man lies in bed, paralyzed from the waist down. He says he was shot by a sniper in the province of Idlib in northern Syria, after two years fighting for the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front. He made it to Turkey, where Saudi diplomats helped get him home. He says he now regrets his journey to Syria, knowing he’ll prob ably never walk again. —Glen Carey

The bottom line The Saudis are trying everything from prison to hotel privileges to turn jihadis into responsible citizens.

Currencies The Mighty Pound

With the fate of the euro in question over the past three months, the big winner in the currency market has been the British pound. Investors spooked by the prospect of Greece’s exit from the euro zone were drawn to the pound’s stability and the U.K.’s strengthening economy.

The pound’s rise is “due to the relative economic outperformance we’ve seen, rather than any big change in rate expectations.” —Simon Smith, chief economist at FXPro Group

The best and worst performers

Change in the value of major currencies vs. the U.S. dollar from April 13 to July 13

-10% -5% 0% 5%

The pound climbed 5.7%

beating the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, the FTSE 100, gold, and oil

British pound Danish krone euro Swedish krona Swiss franc Singapore dollar Taiwanese dollar Norwegian krone The kiwi fell to its lowest level in

Brazilian real Canadian dollar Australian dollar Japanese yen Mexican peso South African rand South Korean won New Zealand dollar

By David Goodman and Mark Glassman

5

years before recovering slightly 10%

Rise of the pound

Deutsche Bank GBP Trade Weighted Index, which tracks the British pound against a basket of currencies

Favorable wage data and a bullish statement from the Bank of England drove this rally

Index value

90.0

The pound dipped on preelection fears of a minority government but rebounded when the Tories won a majority

87.5

85.0

July 20 — July 26, 2015

A page from a Nidec comic book (read right to left)

Nidec’s chief executive sees himself as a comic book hero “Do it now, do it without fail, and do it until it’s completed”

Ambition matters more than brains in Shigenobu Nagamori’s world. As chief executive officer of Japanese motor maker Nidec, Nagamori is known for his eccentric management style. Prospective employees have faced off against each other in eating and shouting competitions; new hires at headquarters in Kyoto have had to clean toilets. “Motivated people can do anything if they work hard,” Nagamori says in his autobiographical comic book, The Man Hotter Than the Sun. “It’s not people’s talents that matter,” the CEO tells his acolytes in one strip. Passion matters, and enthusiasm, and tenacity. And, if Nagamori is a role model, something else matters as well: a sizable ego.

Employees embrace his hard-line approach, says Ken Kusunoki, a professor of business strategy at Tokyo’s

Hitotsubashi University. They’re motivated to work as hard as the

CEO tells them to. “That’s how he’s able to make these businesses so profitable,” Kusunoki says.

The businesses include more than 41 companies that Nidec has acquired since its founding in 1973.

Many were distressed and near bankruptcy. Most of the acquisitions after 2001 expanded Nidec’s operations beyond Japan. The corporation is the world’s biggest maker of precision motors, supplying more than 80 percent of the motors in hard-disk drives. In recent years, Nidec has started to produce motors for factory equipment, appliances, and cars. The company’s market value is $23 billion, and Nagamori’s shares, worth $2 billion, have made him the 10th-richest man in Japan. He boasts of a rags-toriches rise: Starting with three employees, he made small motors in a prefabricated hut next to his mother’s Kyoto farmhouse. Japanese companies, questioning the upstart’s abilities, refused to place orders with him. So Nagamori went to the U.S. and landed a contract with 3M to make a smaller motor for a tape recorder. “With this, Nidec Corporation’s reputation grew both inside and outside