The business of life & living
ISSUE
122
CASHLESS SOCIETY
GROWING UP MOBILE
How Sweden is leading the way
The online habits of a generation
HEDGE FUNDS
JEWEL THIEVES
Are they losing their appeal?
London’s biggest ever robbery
THE FUTURE OF EMPLOYMENT Almost half of all jobs could be done by robots... should you be worried?
february issue 122
The business of life & living
Exclusive to Emirates First Class and Business Class
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Obaid Humaid al Tayer MANAGING PARTNER & GROUP EDITOR ian Fairservice EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Gina JOHnsOn GROUP EDITOR mark evans marke@motivate.ae EDITOR maTTHew POmrOy matthew.pomroy@motivate.ae sENIOR ART DIRECTOR sara raFaGHellO sarar@motivate.ae sENIOR DEsIGNER rOui FranciscO rom@motivate.ae sUb-EDITOR salil kumar salil@motivate.ae EDITORIAL AssIsTANT lOndresa FlOres londresa@motivate.ae GENERAL MANAGER – PRODUCTION sunil kumar sunil@motivate.ae PRODUCTION MANAGER r. murali krisHnan muralik@motivate.ae PRODUCTION sUPERvIsOR veniTa PinTO venita@motivate.ae CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER anTHOny milne anthony@motivate.ae GROUP sALEs DIRECTOR craiG waGsTaFF craig.wagstaff@motivate.ae INTERNATIONAL sALEs MANAGER marTin balmer martin.balmer@motivate.ae GROUP sALEs MANAGER Jaya balakrisHnan jaya@motivate.ae sENIOR sALEs MANAGER micHael underdOwn michael@motivate.ae Emirates takes care to ensure that all facts published herein are correct. In the event of any inaccuracy please contact the editor. Any opinion expressed is the honest belief of the author based on all available facts. Comments and facts should not be relied upon by the reader in taking commercial, legal, financial or other decisions. Articles are by their nature general and specialist advice should always be consulted before any actions are taken. All dollar prices throughout the magazine refer to US dollars. Published for Emirates by
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FEBRUARY ISSUE 122
CONTENTS UPFRONT
18
INFORMATION
The map of extinct animals
22
MOST WANTED
Digital turntables and bespoke book collections
24
LIVING
THE CLOUD
76
When you store things in ‘the cloud’ where does it go?
26
CASHLESS
The move towards and increasingly cashless society
30
PRIVATE EYE
The man behind the great British satirical magazine
34
HER LAST YAHOO
Why have things gone wrong for Marissa Mayer at Yahoo?
HOTEL RESORT
Five-star island on the Great Barrier Reef
82
INVESTMENT PIECE
The Alden 405 boot
85
TOP TABLE
London’s latest must-try restaurant
88
HOTEL
The Lanesborough, post$100 million refurbishment
90
COLUMN
What this year’s Pantone colours mean for design
15
31,041 copies January - June 2015
PORTFOLIO.
FEBRUARY ISSUE 122
CONTENTS FEATURES
38 GROWING UP MOBILE
How a survey app illuminates the habits of a generation
44 JEWEL THIEVES
The Hatton Garden heist and the elderly thieves who pulled off the biggest job
48 TRUNK ARCHIVE
The man behind the defining image collection and where he plans to go next
52 SKULLS AND BONES
China’s dinosaur museum may not be all that we first thought
56 HEDGE FUNDERS
Is Hollywood right and has working in a hedge fund lost its appeal?
60 FIVE WAYS WORKING WILL CHANGE
How your working life is set to dramatically change in the near future
16
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UPFRONT
UPFRONT
PORTFOLIO.
Map of extinct animals
18
PORTFOLIO.
FEBRUARY /INFOGRAPHIC
ISSUE 122
Extracted from Vargic’s Miscellany Of Curious Maps by Martin Vargic. Published 2015 by Harper Design, imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
19
PORTFOLIO.
february upfront / livingsocial
issue 122
LivingSocial T A brief cautionary tale for today’s unicorns. Words: Mike Isaac and Katie Benner
he first thing you see when walking into the headquarters of LivingSocial is row upon row of mostly empty desks, broken up by small street signs that employees once needed to find one another when the office teemed with people. One row, BYFAD Lane, was named after a startup, BuyYourFriendADrink, which LivingSocial acquired to get into the daily deals business. Other signs, such as Sky Diving Street, were named for some of the hottest discount coupons the company once provided. On a recent visit, some desks were piled high with boxes of employee belongings, the detritus left behind after a round of layoffs that eliminated one-fifth of the workforce. In one refrigerator, the milk was six months old. The street signs are “anecdotes from our past”, said Mike Santore, who was director of content strategy at LivingSocial, referring to a time when it was nearly impossible to find a quiet desk to work. Now, he said, the signs “don’t mean
anything, really”. Santore left the company last November. The tech industry’s recent boom has been defined by the rise of “unicorns”, companies that investors have valued at $1 billion or more. Before the term came into vogue, LivingSocial was among the biggest, but now offers a glimpse of what some of today’s unicorns might look like in the future. Four years ago, LivingSocial and its larger rival Groupon grew rapidly on a simple pitch: the companies would match customers to local businesses with a daily deal in users’ inboxes, like half off at a local deli or a two-for-one massage promotion. LivingSocial and Groupon would take a cut of each transaction. Venture capitalists anointed daily deals as the way the internet would invade local business, and by late 2011, LivingSocial had raised more than $800 million and reached a valuation of $4.5 billion. The company counted Amazon and the mutual fund giant T Rowe Price among its investors. It spent heavily, blanketing the airwaves with TV ad campaigns. Riding a wave of
momentum, the company explored going public. Today, LivingSocial is more unicorpse than unicorn. The company never filed for an IPO and consumer fervour for daily deals has cooled. T Rowe Price has written down its stake in LivingSocial to nearly zero, data from Morningstar shows. The company’s workforce has shrunk to around 800 employees from 4,500 at its peak in 2011. Groupon, which did go public, is trading at more than 85 per cent below its IPO price. Gautam Thakar (pictured), LivigSocial’s chief, says the company will rely less on daily deals in its next act, by focusing on “new experiences”, such as a coupon-free programme that puts cash back on customers’ credit cards when they dine at certain restaurants. The company is grappling with employee retention. It has also been selling nearly all of the foreign companies it bought and closing offices. “It’s hard to change a business at scale overnight,” said Jim Bramson, general counsel for LivingSocial. “We’re in a little bit of an Act II.” They may soon have more company. There are 142 unicorns that are together valued at around $500 billion and some are starting to show some cracks. Snapchat, the messaging company, and Dropbox, the online storage business, were marked down in value by mutual fund investors. Zenefits, a human resources startup, has said it missed sales targets and that it is slowing its hiring. Recently, the payments company Square (valued at $6 billion last year) priced its public offering at $2.9 billion. Silicon Valley venture capitalists such as Bill Gurley of Benchmark and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital have warned that a unicorn shakeout is coming. Venky Ganesan 21 is a venture capitalist in Menlo Ventures and just as LivingSocial’s valuation set expectations that were too high for the company to meet, he said, “Today’s unicorns will face the same problems.” Portfolio.
FEBRUARY ISSUE 122
UPFRONT / MOST WANTED
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UPFRONT
Where is ‘the cloud’ and who owns it? Strangely, the exact location of all your data is unknown. Words: Yehia Elkhatib
W
hy invest in purchasing, housing and maintaining a set of computers when you can outsource all that worry to someone else? This has been the oft-used marketing slogan of cloud computing. And it works. It is much easier to offload the data hassle and focus your resources (especially if they’re limited) on your core operations. During their astounding growth in the middle of the last decade, technology companies such as Amazon and Google built huge infrastructures to power their evergrowing needs. It is estimated that Amazon, for example, has more than two million servers around the world, while Google is estimated to have 10 exabytes of data storage space. That’s 10 million terabytes, 24 or 10 billion gigabytes. Over time, they learned how to manage all their software and hardware assets in these infrastructures without significantly increasing costs. PORTFOLIO.
They also realised that these infrastructures could be leased out to external companies for them to use as and when they wish. This significantly lowers the amount of capital expenditure required by these businesses to build server set-ups and also allows them to scale this up and down as dictated by their needs. This was the birth of cloud computing, so called because computer specialists commonly use a cloud cartoon in schematic diagrams to refer to parts in the system that are opaque. But while we know that it works – the global cloud computing market is forecast to reach $127 billion in the next two years – we are less sure exactly how it works. For example, we know that cloud providers typically store your data in different locations for reliability, but we don’t know where exactly or how many copies of it they keep. In fact, identifying the exact location of all your data in the cloud is a near impossible feat. Only a few cloud providers
FEBRUARY /THE CLOUD allow users to choose which countries their data is stored in, although more providers are slowly catering to such needs. We do know that the highest density of cloud servers are located in the United States and Ireland. This means that it is subject to various changing national and international laws. Data held in the EU, for example, is subject to the EU Data Protection Directive, to which companies transferring data in and out of the EU must conform. Until recently, the EU-US “safe harbour” agreement made this straightforward, but Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding US surveillance led to it being invalidated by the European Court Of Justice. The matter of who actually owns your data is also quite complicated. The short answer is that you own the data you create, but the cloud service provider has ultimate control over it. This is reflected in many providers’ terms of service, which state that they can hold on to the data to comply with legal regulations. They can also pass on the data to government organisations if requested (for example, DropBox). On the
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upside, providers are responsible for securing the data they hold on your behalf against misuse, especially if it relates to credit card information – although there have been a number of large-scale data breaches. Moreover, many service providers, such as Facebook and DropBox, say that there may be a delay before your data is deleted upon your request, but they do not specify how long this delay would be. A lot of this is likely to change, though. The European Commission is in the process of updating its regulations to provide more transparent control of personal data in the cloud. Expanding the cloud model beyond massive data centres and integrating it within the fabric of residential and business buildings can present great opportunities. Some refer to this as fog computing. Battery-operated micro-clouds would also act as important hubs to post and relay information within and between communities that have been cut off due to natural disasters (floods and earthquakes, for example) and security crises (terrorist attacks and riots). But how big the cloud will become and how we will all navigate our way around it remains a murky topic.
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upfront finance | sweden
Cash-free Sweden Where even banks don’t accept bills. Words: Liz Alderman
P
arishioners text tithes to their churches. Homeless street vendors carry mobile credit-card readers. Even the Abba Museum, despite being a shrine to the 1970s pop group that wrote Money, Money, Money, considers cash so last-century that it does not accept bills and coins. Few places are tilting toward a cashless future as quickly as Sweden, which has become hooked on the convenience of paying by app and plastic. This tech-forward country, home to the music streaming service Spotify and the maker of the Candy Crush mobile games, has been lured by the innovations that make digital payments easier. It is also a practical matter, as many of the country’s banks no longer accept or dispense cash. At the Abba Museum, “we don’t want to be behind the times by taking cash while cash is dying out”, said Bjorn Ulvaeus, a former Abba member who has leveraged the band’s legacy into a sprawling business empire, including the museum. Not everyone is cheering. Sweden’s embrace of electronic payments has alarmed consumer organisations and critics who warn of a rising threat to privacy and increased vulnerability to sophisticated internet crimes. In 2014, the number of electronic 26 fraud cases surged to 140,000, more than double the number a decade ago, according to Sweden’s Ministry Of Justice. Older adults and refugees in Sweden who use cash may be Portfolio.
8%
of the world’s money is physical cash, the rest is electronic
marginalised, critics say. And young people who use apps to pay for everything or take out loans via their mobile phones risk falling into debt. “It might be trendy,” said Bjorn Eriksson, a former director of the Swedish police force and former president of Interpol. “But there are all sorts of risks when a society starts to go cashless.” But advocates like Ulvaeus cite personal safety as a reason that countries should go cash-free. He switched to using only card and electronic payments after his son’s Stockholm apartment was burglarised twice several years ago. “There was such a feeling of insecurity,” said Ulvaeus, who carries no cash at all. “It made me think: what would happen if this was a cashless society and the robbers couldn’t sell what they stole?” Bills and coins now represent just two per cent of Sweden’s economy, compared with 7.7 per cent in the United States and 10 per cent in the euro area. In 2015, only a fifth of all consumer payments in Sweden were made in cash, compared with an average of 75 per cent in the rest of the world, according to Euromonitor International. Cards are still king in Sweden – with nearly 2.4 billion credit and debit transactions in 2013, compared with 213 million 15 years earlier. But even plastic is facing competition, as a rising number of Swedes use apps for everyday commerce. At more than half of the branches of the country’s biggest banks, including SEB, Swedbank, Nordea Bank and others, no cash
is kept on hand, nor are cash deposits accepted. They say they are saving a significant amount on security by removing the incentive for bank robberies. In 2014, Swedish bank vaults held around 3.6 billion kronor ($422 million) in notes and coins, down from 8.7 billion ($1.01 billion) in 2010, according to the Bank For International Settlements. Cash machines, which are controlled by a Swedish bank consortium, are being dismantled by the hundreds, especially in rural areas. Eriksson, who now heads the Association Of Swedish Private Security Companies, a lobbying group for firms providing security for cash transfers, accuses banks and credit card companies of trying to “price cash out of the market” to make way for cards and electronic payments, which generate fee income. “I don’t think that’s something they should decide on their own,” he said. “Should they really be able to use their market force to turn Sweden into a cashless society?” The government has not sought to stem the cashless tide. If anything, it has benefited from more efficient tax collection, because electronic transactions leave a trail; in countries like Greece and Italy, where cash is still heavily used, tax evasion remains a big problem. Leif Trogen, an official at the Swedish Bankers’ Association, acknowledged that banks are earning substantial fee income from the cashless revolution. But because it costs money for banks and businesses to conduct
february /cashless
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Portfolio.
february upfront / cashless
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2016 could be the year for your digital wallet Near field communication (NFC) chips in mobile phones are what makes tap-and-go services like Apple Pay and Google Wallet possible. NFC chips in credit cards are not new, but recent phones now also have them – iPhone 5s doesn’t, but iPhone 6 does, for example. But as people upgrade their phones, so using a mobile device as a digital wallet will become commonplace. And coupled with the increase in payment apps, our phones will increasingly become the everything device in our increasingly paperless world.
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Portfolio.
commerce in cash, reducing its use makes financial sense, he said. The shift has rippled through even the most unlikely corners of the Swedish economy. Stefan Wikberg, 65, was homeless for four years after losing his job as an information technology technician. He has a place to live now and sells magazines for Situation Stockholm, a charitable organisation, and began using a mobile card reader to take payments, after noticing that almost no one carried cash. “Now people can’t get away,” said Wikberg, who carries a sign saying he accepts Visa, MasterCard and American Express. “When they say, ‘I don’t have change,’ I tell them they can pay with card or even by SMS,” he said, referring to text messages. His sales have grown by 30 per cent since he adopted the card reader two years ago. At the Filadelfia Stockholm church, so few of the 1,000 parishioners now carry cash that the church had to adapt, said Soren Eskilsson, the executive pastor. During a recent service, the church’s bank account number was projected onto a large screen. Worshippers pulled out cellphones and tithed through an app called Swish, a payment system set up by Sweden’s biggest banks. Other
“everything speaks in favour of a cashless society – it’s a utopian thought, but we’re now very close to it” congregants lined up at a special “Kollektomat” card machine, where they could transfer funds to various church operations. In 2014, out of 20 million kronor ($2.3 million) in tithes collected, more than 85 per cent came in by card or digital payment. Despite the convenience, even some who stand to gain from a cashless society see drawbacks. “Sweden has always been at the forefront of technology, so it’s easy to embrace this,” said Jacob de Geer, a founder of iZettle, which makes a mobile-powered card reader.
“But Big Brother can watch exactly what you’re doing if you purchase things only electronically.” But for Ulvaeus, the music magnate, such concerns are overblown. “Everything speaks in favour of a cashless society,” he said as he strolled past the Abba Museum to retrieve his car. “It’s a utopian thought, but we’re now very close to it.” He paused at a hot-dog stand for a snack. But when he was ready to pay, the card reader was broken. “Sorry,” the vendor said. “You’ll have to use cash.”
upfront
Ian Hislop publishing | england
Britain’s enduring and erudite court jester. Words: Steven Erlanger
I
an Hislop looks mild and soft, rather like a pudding, with a nascent double-chin and not much hair. He is polite, soft-spoken and was, appropriately enough, born in the district of Swansea, Wales, called Mumbles. Appearances aside, Hislop is the much-feared czar of Private Eye, Britain’s clubby satirical and investigative magazine, and probably wields as much power, if he chooses, as any media boss in Britain. The whole thing astounds him, of course. Like a good British man of a certain educated class, Hislop,
on one another, often getting sued in the process, and poked fun at everyone else. “I just knew I wanted to do what I’d been getting away with at university – which was reading, writing about it, putting on stupid revues and working for student magazines,” Hislop said. “And I thought, ‘This is great. Will someone pay me in the real world to do this?’ And for about 30 years I’ve got away with it.” Early on, he gave a speech about how he would remain editor for a few years, fix the magazine and move on. “Which is hysterical,
“We are now selling more copies than 20 years ago, and have largely bucked the digital trend by not going digital” 55, is absurdly self-deprecating, treating his accomplishments as some happy and wholly undeserved accident arranged as yet another joke by a self-amused deity. He joined Private Eye directly from Oxford, where he read English literature, edited a student magazine called Passing 30 Wind and wrote comedy revues. He became editor of Private Eye nearly 30 years ago, taking over from Richard Ingrams, who shaped the magazine as the place where the British elite told tales Portfolio.
because I obviously did nothing of the sort,” he said. “I’m 55 and my 26-year-old self would have had a fit, someone so elderly hanging on to this job. But I can’t think of what else would be more fun.” The magazine is private but highly profitable, with a paid circulation of about 230,000 copies, and it gives very little away online. Like the French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, it is printed on cheap paper and looks like a comic book. “The world is changing a lot, but we are now
selling more copies than we were 20 years ago, and we have largely bucked the digital trend by not going digital,” Hislop said. “My only idea has been, ‘Don’t give away content for free,’” he added. “That’s been my single contribution, and it’s worked for us. And also I’m just very oldfashioned about paying people.” Like its French counterpart, Private Eye combines jokes, many of them unashamedly adolescent, with serious investigative journalism of the kind most British papers no longer do. The trick, Hislop says, involves the readers, who provide leaks about what they know and love to settle scores. “Professional gossip is really what drives this magazine,” he said. “It’s an insider job, Private Eye. People say, ‘Well, why do you get such good stories?’ and I always say, ‘Well, look who’s reading it.’ These are the people who know, and they tell us. So if you want to find out what’s going on in the Health Service, there are plenty of disgruntled doctors who will tell you. We’ve got people there who know, and MPs, and you know how leaky journalism is, so that’s not a problem. Lots of scores to settle.” The magazine is also a good antidote to the British news media. “In the old days, Private Eye was
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february upfront / private eye
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there to break stories,” Hislop said. “Nowadays, we’re there to explain why stories are irrelevant or wrong and what the real story is.” Hislop does the same on the long-running BBC satirical television show, Have I Got News For You. But he knows the magazine really sells because of the jokes. “It’s expanded in terms of numbers of columns, numbers of areas we look at, but the essential mix is still the same,” he said. “Jokes, journalism. That’s it.” In that order? “Yeah.” 32 A recent cover proclaimed, “Cameron to bomb ISIS heartland,” with a fighter pilot saying, “Belgium, here we come!” Another piece mocked the rhetoric around the airstrikes in Syria, Portfolio.
“Satire has always been about exposing vice, folly and humbug”
saying that the British Parliament had taken “the most important decision since the country went to war with Hitler in 1939”, as “Britain is now fully committed to continuing to bomb from the air a bit but not, of course, doing anything silly like putting troops on the ground where they might win or get killed.” Satire, he said, has always been about exposing “vice, folly and humbug”, but vice seems to bore him, and he quickly got rid of the magazine’s gossip columns. “Do you really care who the duke of Devonshire’s niece is sleeping with? I never did.” His decision was aided, he concedes, when those columnists tried to block him as editor, so he fired them.
Hislop is the country’s court jester, but concedes he wants to be taken as an homme sérieux, having done documentaries and books on weightier topics. Asked what he finds most ludicrous about Britain, Hislop thought for a moment, then cited author Alan Bennett, now 81. “He was sitting writing and he heard the bands rehearsing for the Trooping The Colour,” the parade that marks the official birthday of the monarch. “And he looked out of his window and said, ‘I was just thinking how utterly ridiculous this pompous nonsense is,’ and then he said, ‘I realised I had a lump in my throat.’ And being British,” Hislop said, “that is sort of what it’s like.”
upfront
Marissa Mayer’s last Yahoo?
A leader foiled by her inability to bet the farm. Words: Farhad Manjoo
I
t’s not a big surprise that Marissa Mayer has failed to resurrect Yahoo. When the celebrated Google executive took over the web’s most iconic nervous wreck in 2012, the odds were stacked 34 against her. Turning around any company is difficult; turning around a tech company is nearly unheard-of. There’s just one example everyone can think of – Apple – but that effort took nearly a decade to show results, and anyway, if your requirement for success is to be like Steve Jobs, good luck to you. Portfolio.
What is genuinely surprising is how boring Mayer’s tenure has been. Three years ago, when Mayer first took over, she sparked excitement about the future of a company that had, by then, put everyone to sleep. Finally, Yahoo was getting an executive who seemed to understand the web, who was infectiously excited about the possibilities of new technologies and who had a pretty good track record of ushering in new things.
february /yahoo At the time, Yahoo was desperately in need of a new identity. The era of the web portal – a single website to serve all your online needs – had long passed, and Mayer seemed courageous enough to shed that legacy business and start something new. Few were betting that she would succeed, but just about everyone inside and outside the company thought it would be fun to watch her try. What has happened is more pedestrian. Mayer has focused Yahoo’s resources on creating better mobile apps and a better video-viewing experience and building an advertising business that does away with old-fashioned banner ads. Nearly a year ago, I argued that some of these efforts were bearing fruit and that investors should give Mayer more time. Since then, progress has stalled, and Yahoo’s recent earnings reports have been dismal. Yet the initial success followed by recent sluggishness is beside the point. The larger story of Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo is one of a transformation so modest it borders on stasis. Overall, Yahoo remains much the same business it was three years ago. It is a far-flung collection of news, entertainment and communications destinations supported by ads. Mayer was hired to build something novel. Instead, at best, she appears to be building a better Yahoo – with debatable results. What is the different company that Mayer might have built? One idea was to ditch the web portal and plunge into television. “One transformational thing that she could have done was buy Netflix,” said Robert Peck, an analyst who follows Yahoo for SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. The timing was perfect: in 2012, a visionary might have guessed that cable bundles would soon be on the wane, that people would increasingly favour on-demand entertainment and that there was an appetite for new business models in an ageing part of the media. At the time, the stock market doubted Netflix’s streaming future, and the company’s shares were less than a tenth of their current price – in the ballpark of what Yahoo would have been able to afford. Or if Netflix wouldn’t sell, Yahoo could have built its own subscriptionbased original programming business, an in-house competitor to Netflix. Since then Netflix, which has poured money into creating a series of hit TV shows, has soared, and its subscription-based model for television has been widely hailed as the future of the industry. Mayer, on the other hand, bought the blogging platform Tumblr and a few other properties, “but for whatever reason, a lot of those just haven’t paid off”, Peck said.
A defender might point out that Mayer eventually jumped into Netflix-like original programming and that the project failed. In 2014, Yahoo announced two new half-hour comedies and saved Community, the cult-hit NBC show, from cancellation. In October, it scrapped the whole project, citing a dearth of viewers and advertisers, and took a $42 million charge on the deal. But Yahoo’s fumbled foray into TV only highlights Mayer’s strategic failure. Instead of making a single big bet that might have focused the company on something completely different and potentially groundbreaking, Mayer staked out a lot of small and medium-size positions, rarely committing to anything early enough to make a difference. For Mayer, original programming was just one of dozens of products in a portfolio that remains too complex to understand. So, too, were other projects that could have been at the centre of Yahoo’s new mission. In the time that Mayer has been at the helm, Facebook has invested heavily in messaging apps that could define the future of communication. Google and Apple, anticipating the eventual decline of text-based search queries, have tried to create predictive, voice-based search engines that also catalogue all the content inside apps. Pinterest is pioneering a new kind of online commerce, while Instagram, Snapchat and Vine are working on new ways to tell collective narratives through video. Under Mayer, Yahoo has had a hand in many similar initiatives, but it hasn’t led in any of these areas. If Mayer had picked a single project on which to hang the future of Yahoo – or some new thing no other company was working on – she could have accomplished something transformational, finally giving Yahoo a purpose. None of it would have been easy. Mayer’s tenure has been consumed by confrontations with investors over the continuing complexity of spinning off Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant. Any big, expensive bet-the-farm decision to focus Yahoo on a single product would have been likely to anger investors even more and would probably have lowered morale among sidelined employees. The plan that Mayer pursued instead – to do a little bit of everything slightly better than Yahoo was doing it before – was by comparison pretty safe. But that’s the trouble: Marissa Mayer wasn’t hired to do the safe thing. She was picked to be bold, and so far, she has failed.
“Mayer staked out a lot of small and medium-size positions, rarely committing to anything early enough to make a difference”
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Key moments under Melissa Mayer Jul 2012 Becomes the seventh CEO of Yahoo in less than five years feb 2013 Abolishes Yahoo’s work-athome policy
mar 2013 Buys Summly, a news-reading app, from a 17-year-old student for $30 million may 2013 Yahoo buys Tumblr for $1.1 billion Jul 2013 Yahoo traffic tops Google’s for first time since 2011
oct 2013 Oversees the unpopular redesign of Yahoo Mail nov 2013 Hires Katie Couric to be the “global anchor” for Yahoo Jul 2015 Buys the Shopping Site Polyvore Portfolio.
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A bad review is forever How to counter online complaints. Words: Constance Gustke
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or restaurateur Andrew Gruel, poor online reviews demand rapid responses. One of his new Slapfish restaurants, serving sustainable seafood, was hit in 2015 with dozens of bad reviews that complained about its prices (too high) and portions (too small). So Gruel pulled out all the stops. He sent e-mails to customers begging them to come back. And he rejiggered menu prices, increased portion size and even introduced combo meal deals. Quickly, those one-star reviews shifted into five stars. “You can get buried by bad reviews,” said Gruel, whose fastcasual restaurants serve food like fish tacos and lobster burgers. “So it’s a race to stop the bleeding.” The payoff, he added, can be tremendous. Turning around one-star reviews creates lifetime customers – and better reviews draw in more. Gruel’s extreme approach to bad reviews may sound like overkill. But studies show that consumers overwhelmingly choose businesses based mainly on star ratings. Even a decline of
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one star, on a scale from one to five, can hurt revenue and send a business into a slide. So tracking a business’ online reputation is a critical part of building a thriving company, experts said. “Star ratings persist forever,” said Daniel Lemin, author of ManipuRated: How Business Owners Can Fight Fraudulent Online Ratings And Reviews. “Meanwhile, actual reviews can fall off the first pages of review sites. And consumers rarely read reviews older than three months.” After problems are addressed and solved, he added, there’s a high chance that disgruntled customers can become avid advocates. So small businesses have nothing to lose by engaging
their critics, Lemin said. The recipe is simply apologising and asking for another chance. The criticism may hurt, he added, but the way a business responds matters. Yelp is, of course, the powerhouse review site that is most watched. According to a Nielsen survey, 44 per cent of consumers use Yelp to search for local businesses. TripAdvisor and Angie’s List have much smaller followings. This has prompted the growth of reputation management companies such as ReviewTrackers, Reputation.com, and Status Labs. They typically use data-analysis tools or software to find online reviews and rapidly respond to them.
february /online review
issue 122
power to the people
“Dining experiences live on in the computer and they reach thousands of people. But you can only manage a fraction of that experience” ReviewTrackers tracks over 70 review sites, said Chris Campbell, chief executive and founder. “That number grows every quarter,” he said. Free tools like Google Alerts do not always pick up every review site, he added. “Your customers are already talking about you. So you can’t just ignore them. Anyway, businesses
that engage with their customers are growing.” Studies show, he said, that the quality of a restaurant’s online reviews can even predict how fast it will close. Gruel, a trained chef who started his business in a food truck, prefers to respond to reviews himself. He fears using “canned responses that aren’t personal”. If he cannot respond quickly, he asks an employee to do it for him. Armed with two smartphones and an iPad, Gruel already responds to about 50 online reviews a day, regardless of whether they are positive or negative. “Dining experiences live on in the computer,” he said. “And they
reach thousands of people. But you can only manage a fraction of that experience inside the restaurant.” He added that he also checks Yelp statistics, which analyse things like how many people visit a review page, that are e-mailed to him. Checking online reviews every few days is now a business necessity, many experts said. Barbara Findlay Schenck, author of Small Business Marketing Kit For Dummies, recommends finding out which three sites customers use most and then setting up online alerts to monitor them. “Be strong where your customers are looking,” she advised. “The minute you see a bad review, look for a shard of truth,” she said. “Is this something you can improve? Look for what you can fix.” But don’t fight fire with fire by getting into an argument with a reviewer, she added. Positive reviews are good marketing fodder. “You can blast them out by putting Yelp badges with the number of five-star reviews on your website,” said Darnell Holloway, director of local business outreach at Yelp. Now it’s all about relational capital, he said, and you don’t need a big marketing budget. Gruel also enlists Yelp’s Elite Squad, which reveals emerging hot spots. “About 70 per cent of our business has grown through Yelp and Instagram,” he said. One study even found that a 3.5-star rating that gets bumped up to four stars can result in a 19 per cent increase in peak-hour bookings. Gruel said he aimed for fouror five-star reviews. “They will make my business sustainable,” he said.
tripAdvisor ‒ The largest travel site in the world, with more than 225 million reviews, opinions, and photos taken by travellers
Yelp ‒ With 135 million visitors every month and 90 million peer reviews of local businesses from dentists to restaurants and more
Amazon ‒ Not just books but everything they sell. It’s a hugely influential site, with 1.2 million reviews of tech gear alone
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growing up mobile
GroWinG Up Mobile The effort by Wishbone, a social networking application full of breezy polls about pop culture, to understand its teenage audience illuminates the habits of a generation. Words: Conor Dougherty 39
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ver the past decade, advertisers have spent untold millions trying to turn Talia Kocar and her peers in the millennial generation into loyal customers. But on a recent afternoon in Santa Monica, California, in a kind of consumer torch-passing, Kocar, 25, watched a focus group of teenagers drink free Snapple and suck Doritos powder off their thumbs while answering questions about their smartphones. Kocar works on Wishbone, a social networking application full of breezy polls about pop culture, prom dresses and other fixtures of teenage life. Users – most of them girls – post side-by-side pictures that compare rappers, celebrities and the like. Kocar said her first attempts at market research began with trips to Starbucks stores and nail salons, where she would find Wishbone users and ask them what they did and did not like about the app. She got lots of information but wanted more. Hence the focus group. Teenagers being teenagers, the room was full of angst and contradictions. They love Instagram, the photo-sharing app, but are terrified their posts will be ignored or mocked. They feel less pressure on Snapchat, the disappearing-message service, but say Snapchat can be annoying because disappearing messages make it hard to follow a continuing conversation. They do not like advertisements but also do not like to pay for things. At one point a questioner asked the group when they were least likely to be online. “When I’m in the shower,” a girl responded. Nobody laughed, because it was barely an exaggeration. About three-quarters of US teenagers have access to a mobile phone, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Centre. Most go online daily, and about a quarter of them use the internet “almost constantly”. Those numbers have created a growing advertising market and fortunes for apps like Snapchat and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. This year companies are projected to spend $30 billion on in-app advertising in the United States alone, roughly double what they spent in 2014, according to eMarketer, a research company. But even though these services all have the same core functions – find friends, post pictures, send messages – teenagers juggle them constantly, developing arcane customs for what to post where 40 and ditching one app for another the moment it becomes uncool. That churn leaves an opening for upstarts like Wishbone, which is about a year old and has about three million monthly users. Since July it has ranked among the top 30 most-downloaded social portfolio.
media apps in Apple’s App Store, according to App Annie, a data and analytics company. But staying there will be tough. Mobile apps are a hit or miss business in which a handful of top players get most of the users and money. Hoping to get their app in that elite few, people like Kocar pore through data and turn to focus groups for insight on how to get new users to sign up and old users to stay. Their efforts are a window into how teenage lives are documented on mobile screens. “They have immediate social validation or lack of validation at the touch of a button,” said Michael Jones, chief executive of Science Inc, which owns Wishbone. “So if you thought that the immediate gratification generation was two generations ago, you haven’t even seen what immediate gratification looks like until you start spending time with a teen on a phone.”
growing up mobile
They have immediate social validation or lack of validation at the touch of a button
One afternoon last summer, Leila Khan and Lucy Nemerov, two eighth-graders from Palo Alto, California, cruised their local mall, scoring free samples at See’s Candies and dropping into Brandy Melville to look at clothes but not buy. Lucy is an avid Wishbone user, but the app is just one among several she and her friends rotate through each day. To manage their identities in and obligations to this world in their pockets, they adhere to rules that have somehow been absorbed and adopted by their peers. For instance, that afternoon, since nothing particularly special happened, Lucy posted a few videos to Snapchat – including a clip of me interviewing her – but nothing on Instagram. Why the distinction? Because Instagram is special, Leila explained. On Snapchat, where messages disappear, you can be less selective because there is a lower bar for quality. On Instagram, you have to be careful not to clog your friends’ feeds with a
Rajada Victor uses the Wishbone app, at home
barrage of low-quality pictures that might annoy them. Neither girl had any such rules for Facebook, because they hardly use it. App makers fear this kind of juggling the way TV networks fear DVRs. Each time someone leaves one app for another, there is a chance that user will never come back. And since apps make money only when users are plugged in and absorbing ads, the number of monthly users is less important than how many users they get each day – and how long they stay. For now, big advertisers remain focused on the millennial generation. But an early wave is starting to think about the next group, said Erna Alfred Liousas, an analyst at Forrester Research, who said the firm had a number of financial services and media companies ask for studies on the under-17 group. As with coffee and newspapers, the key to a successful app is to make it a daily habit. Which is why, in early September, Jones of Science sat in a cinder block room staring at a computer screen full of data. He was with Benoit Vatere, head of Science’s mobile group, and Peter Pham, the company’s chief business officer, discussing the best time to send push notifications alerting Wishbone users to new polls. Push notifications – those incessant reminders that make your phone light up and ding – are the infantry of app warfare, cracking the attention span to remind users that someone on the internet might be talking about them. All summer Wishbone had been sending out alerts four times a day, but the three men were thinking about adding more and, 41 now that students were back in class, trying to recalibrate around the school day. “Can we have a friends feed at noon?” Jones asked Vatere. “It would be great to do ‘Your friends have updated.’” portfolio.
As with coffee and papers, the key to a successful app is to make it a daily habit
“And you talk about it while you’re at school,” Pham added. Every generation has its thing, and the last two have been marked by digital technology. One of the big dividing lines between Generation X and millennials was that millennials grew up with the internet. A big difference between millennials and the next group – the post-millennials – has been smartphones. Economic and cultural changes have an even larger influence, argues Neil Howe, an author and historian who is credited with coining the term “millennial generation”. The Great Recession and its aftermath are likely to make the post-millennial generation more risk-averse, he said. At the same time, today’s kids have absorbed lots of parental advice about online safety and bullying. In surveys, his consulting company, LifeCourse Associates, has found that teenagers are extremely anxious about being criticised on social media and are more conscious than their parents of when an app makes them feel bad – or at least aren’t bashful about saying so. During the recent focus group at Science, one girl said she showed Instagram ideas to at least three people before posting. Another said she deleted any post that did not garner enough likes. “I post and I just delete, because I don’t want to have, like, never mind,” she said, too ashamed to announce the precise number of likes out loud. Wishbone sees those anxieties as an opportunity. The app doesn’t ask users to take pictures in which they look “sooo beautiful!!!!” nor does it require having parents who holiday in Instagramperfect locales. Users just make funny polls to talk about celebrities, makeup and bands. It is about your tastes, not your identity. Rajada Victor, a 14-year-old ninth-grader who lives in Los Angeles, 42 was seated near the girl who was ashamed of her paltry likes. In a follow-up interview, she said she had grown exhausted by the frenzy for online status but was a regular on Wishbone, which she checks all the time: in class, while walking to school, on weekends. portfolio.
Michael Jones, chief executive of Science Inc, which owns Wishbone
growing up mobile
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the unusual suspects
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Graying thieves and record heist undone in London. Words: Dan Bilefsky 45
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n Friday nights for three years, they met over drinks at The Castle, a pub in Islington, in North London. The four men were getting on in years, but they were not there just to talk about retirement plans or the aches and pains of ageing. Experienced thieves with long criminal records, they had something far more pressing in mind: an audacious, career-topping heist they boasted the world would never forget. The operation, meticulously plotted – with the help, police would later find out, of the book Forensics For Dummies – was finally set in motion the Thursday before Easter in 2015, as Brian Reader, the ruddy-faced ringleader whom the others called “the Master”, boarded the No 96 bus near his home in Dartford, Kent. Reader, 76, swiped his free travel pass for seniors and began the 80-minute journey to Hatton Garden, for centuries the centre of London’s jewellery trade. By early evening, Reader reached an inconspicuous, seven-floor building. A large plaque outside read: Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd. The rest of his crew was there, dressed as building workers: John Collins, also known as Kenny, 75; Daniel Jones, 60; and Terrence Perkins, 67. Reader wore a yellow hard hat and a fluorescent jacket with the word “Gas” on the back. In a case that prosecutors have called the largest burglary ever in England, the four men have in the criminal handbook and boasted about the pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal as much as $30 caper, they might never have been caught. “This offense was to be the largest burglary in million in gold, jewellery and gems. Prosecutors English legal history,” prosecusay they used high-powered, tor Philip Evans told Woolwich diamond-tipped drills over The four pleaded Crown Court. “These four the long Easter weekend to ringleaders and organisers of bore an 18-inch hole through guilty to conspiring this conspiracy, although sena concrete wall in a basement to steal as much as ior in years, brought with them vault at the safe deposit com$30 million in gold a great deal of experience.” pany and then made off with On the evening of April the loot. and jewellery 2, Reader and the rest of the As details of the burglary gang were greeted at Hatton have emerged, many have Garden Safe Deposit by a been left wondering how four 46 ageing and sometimes bungling robbers managed red-haired man known as “Basil” who, investigato break into a high-security vault in the centre of tors say, apparently opened the fire escape door London – protected by reinforced concrete, two and let the others in. Several men got out of a white van and unloaded iron gates and a motion-triggered alarm system – and get away with loot-filled wheeled plastic rub- bags, tools and two rubbish bins, taking them in bish bins. Had they not violated one of the first laws on the fire escape and down the stairs, Evans told portfolio.
jewel thieves
Previous page, from left: Terrence Perkins, John Collins, Daniel Jones and Brian Reader. This page, from top: The hole bored in the vault wall; the Hatton Garden safe deposit; The Castle pub; Escape route.
the jury. The men communicated by walkie-talkie. Once inside the building, they disabled the elevator, leaving an “out of order” sign next to it, sent the elevator to the second floor, and shimmied down the elevator shaft to the basement, busting through a metal barrier. They cut a telephone cable jutting out of an alarm box, as well as the wires of an electrical box, disabling an iron gate protecting the vault, prosecutors say. Then they began the long and arduous task of drilling through the vault’s wall, reinforced with concrete – a skill they had perfected by watching clips on YouTube. Shortly after 12.21am on April 3, Alok Bavishi, whose family owns the safety deposit company, received a call that the intruder alarm had been triggered. He testified that his concerns were initially tempered by the fact that a previous alarm had been triggered by an insect. Kelvin Stockwell, a longtime security guard at the building, arrived nearly an hour later. After examining the front door and peering through the letter box of the fire escape door, he told the jury he decided that the building was secure and left without going inside. Police were also notified of the alarm, but no response was deemed necessary. All the while, the thieves were in the basement, breaking into the vault. Police later apologised, saying the “call handling system and procedures for working with the alarm monitoring companies were not followed”. Even so, the gang’s luck proved short-lived. When they finally breached the wall against which the metal cabinet holding the safe deposit boxes was standing, they were stopped in their tracks because the cabinet was bolted to the ceiling and floor, and they were unable to dislodge it. They eventually left around 8am, empty-handed. But they were undeterred, returning two days later, on Perkins’ 67th birthday. The burglary may have gone unnoticed because the security deposit’s neighbouring businesses were closed for the Easter weekend. But the ease with which the thieves left and then returned, undetected, has led some to speculate that the crime was an inside job. On their second attempt, after a trip to the hardware store, the men managed to dislodge the cabinet on the night of April 4, although Reader was not there to enjoy the moment, having apparently lost his nerve.
The men ransacked 73 safe deposit boxes, quickly filling several bags and two large trash bins with jewels, gold, precious stones and cash. Prosecutors said the men struggled to carry all the loot up the stairs to a fire escape. Collins, the lookout, was waiting nearby in the van. At 6.40am, exhausted and out of breath, they sped away. Another two days went by before the theft was discovered. Pictures of the gaping holes drilled through the wall were soon splashed in Britain’s papers. Angry safe deposit box owners, some of them uninsured, lashed out at police and at the safety deposit company for their perceived incompetence. Mirza Baig, a jewellery dealer, said he had lost everything. “I don’t have a penny’s worth of stones left with me because they were all in the safe deposit – the safest place you can imagine,” he told ITV News. For several days, the men revelled in the heist, but police were closing in. The men had been identified at and near the scene from hours of surveillance footage, and electronic bugs, which had been placed in two of their cars, picked up their boasts in a cockney rhyming slang. “The biggest cash robbery in history,” Jones can be heard crowing, lacing his words with expletives, in recordings played in court, “that’s what they are saying.” Perkins said he wished he had taken a selfie at the vault. The men continued to meet at The Castle, a traditional pub. Police filmed them with hidden cameras and used lip readers to figure out what they were saying. After the robbery, they argued over how to split the proceeds and launder the jewels, prosecutors say. Perkins was overheard saying he planned to melt down some of his gold. “That could be my pension,” he said. The men stashed some of the gold and jewels in their homes, behind baseboards and kitchen cabinets. On May 19 – 45 days after the burglary – 200 police officers swept in as Jones and Collins were transferring some of the jewels to the home of Perkins’ daughter. Police raided 12 addresses in North London and a total of eight men have been charged with conspiracy to burgle. Many millions of pounds worth of the stolen loot still has not been found, prosecutors say, and at least some had probably been melted down, laundered or hidden before the arrests. At the time of writing, three of the gang have been found guilty, with sentencing to take place on March 7, while the robbery itself is reportedly going to become the basis for a forthcoming feature film. portfolio.
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The Man Who Would Make The World a PreTTier Place
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Words: Matthew Schneier
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atthew Moneypenny (his real name) is Hollywood handsome, with a dresseddown wardrobe of Saint Laurent and an easy patter somewhere between pitchman and showman. He laughs loudly and has a favourite table at Sant Ambroeus in New York City, as well as a preferred room at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, California. He looks like what industry types call “talent”, but Moneypenny, 46, isn’t talent (though talented). In the congested little world of fashion image-making, he is talent’s agent, the bargaining power behind the throne. Moneypenny’s job is to secure high-revenue deals for top-tier images and image-makers. In effect, he said with a practiced twinkle over cookies at a Sant Ambroeus corner table, “to make the world a prettier place”. Moneypenny is the president and chief executive of Trunk Archive, a photography licensing agency, whose back catalogue of images run in magazines and
product packaging, are loaded as smartphone backdrops and hang on hotel walls. In Trunk’s trunk are images by hundreds of photographers, including many of fashion’s marquee names: Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber, Arthur Elgort and Patrick Demarchelier. Moneypenny has built Trunk into a digital, long-tail boutique of stylish imagery, making the photographers (and the company) significant amounts of money in the process. They are high-end images for highend prices. “If Corbis and Getty are Kmart and Wal-Mart,” Moneypenny said, ticking off two of the larger stock-photo agencies, “we’re Bergdorf Goodman.” Having made a success of reselling existing images, Moneypenny is now getting into the business of creating new ones. Fuelled by investment capital from Waddell & Reed, which has taken positions in companies like Richemont and LVMH, Moneypenny has spent the last two years quietly buying creative agencies. The result
”If CorbIs and Getty are KMart and Wal-Mart We’re berGdorf GoodMan”
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is Great Bowery, a group that will include Trunk Archive and 11 other assignment and licensing agencies under its umbrella. Great Bowery is a mega-agency, one whose ambition is to rebalance the scales, empowering those who make fashion’s imagery – photographers, fashion stylists, hair and makeup artists and set designers – and checking, implicitly, the powerful and increasingly integrated luxury companies and media conglomerates that have traditionally commissioned their work. He sees it as nothing less than the fashion analogue of the rise of the agency system in Hollywood, which unseated the film studios as the sole kingmakers and deal-brokers. “If one can say three pillars were originally music, television and film, I would argue that fashion is now the fourth pillar,” Moneypenny said. “Twenty years ago, it was the socialite on the Upper East Side (in the New York City borough of Manhattan) or the resident of Mayfair or Beverly Hills that was aware of what was coming down the Chanel or Dior runway. There’s so much more interest about the creativity that comes out of this world.”
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oneypenny is far from the only observer to make this connection, but he is better positioned than most to connect the dots. He is, by his own estimation, the only fashion agent with a background in Hollywood representation and management. He began his career at ICM, the Hollywood agency, talking his way from the mailroom to the desk of Nancy Josephson, the co-president. “He would call up Gucci at the time Tom Ford was designing and say, ‘My boss has no time to shop, send over the entire line,’” said Josephson, now a partner at WME. “I have a lot of chutzpah, but I would not have thought to do that. And he got me a discount!” The Hollywood model was an explicit reference for Great Bowery. “So many of the systems I learned
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cartier.com
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during my time at ICM, I still employ today,” Moneypenny said. Fabien Baron, editorial director of Interview Magazine, has seen what the corporatisation of the industry has wrought: the move to be more things to more people, with static budgets and increased demands. Baron, who is considering a handful of projects with Moneypenny, expressed admiration for his strategy. “The idea of turning this into the CAA of fashion is interesting,” he said, referring to the Hollywood agency. “It makes a lot of sense to me.” Most of the agencies now under the aegis of Great Bowery, like CLM, M.A.P, Management & Artists and Streeters, are unfamiliar to the public. So, too, are many of the artists they represent. Their work is not. You have seen it in the glossy spreads of fashion magazines, the ad campaigns that precede them, the billboards and bus shelters luxury companies commandeer, and the videos that run on their Instagram accounts and websites. If they are not, on the whole, household names the way CAA clients like Julia Roberts, George Clooney and Madonna are, Moneypenny is betting that they can be. Their rates can already run Hollywood stratospheric, and their visibility is rising to match. Is
“three pillars were music, tV and film... fashion is now the fourth”
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Pat McGrath, the most in-demand of the runway makeup artists, say, primed to become a name-brand megastar? “Some designers are big, famous stars,” Baron said. “Also photographers are, and stylists are, and models are. Everybody’s kind of important. It’s become popular culture.”
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ith importance comes opportunity. Moneypenny envisages product lines, brand extensions, exhibitions and endorsements even if the jobs these artists now do didn’t exist a generation or two earlier. Many of the changes Great Bowery hopes to affect are of the unsexy, business-efficiency type. By combining agencies into one organisation it hopes to consolidate back-end services like legal, accounting, human resources and operations, and share them across the entire company. Moneypenny said that individual agencies would be left to conduct business as they see fit, and artists would not be asked to sign new contracts. But even if Moneypenny does not aim to hijack the fashion world, as he told Fantastic Man magazine, he is looking to disrupt it. Great Bowery is making new hires who will focus on developing social
media, branded content, endorsements and collaborations for artists companywide, and the agency plans to act as a producer of its artists’ projects, rather than merely a conduit to them. “We would all like to see the agency operate as a studio,” Moneypenny said, “packaging” projects (in Hollywood parlance) and marketing them itself. “That package doesn’t necessarily have to be fashion,” he added. “It could be a line of products for an electronics maker. It really could be almost anything.” Moneypenny’s hope is that every qualified artist in the stable can become an expert. He held up photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, whose archive Trunk licences, as an example: they are in-demand photographers, working for Vogue and W, Chloé and Calvin Klein. They also design jewellery and a collection of jeans, recently published a career-spanning retrospective with Taschen, and shot a music video with Paul McCartney, Rihanna 51 and Kanye West. In his version of the future, deals such as those may be worked through Great Bowery with a commission on each. portfolio.
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Jurassic Larks The murky origins of the largest dinosaur museum in the world. Words: Dan Levin
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A 100-millionyear-old fossil of a Psittacosaurus with its offspring on display at the Tianyu Museum Of Nature in Pingyi, China
ere are a few quirky and little-known facts about Pingyi, an industrial backwater in China: locals have a fondness for fried cicadas, and the city, a major processor of fruits and nuts, bills itself as the “China Foodstuff Canned City”. All the same, Pingyi is often overlooked for what should probably be its greatest claim to fame: palaeontologists say it is home to the world’s largest collection of complete dinosaur fossils, many of which show evidence of feathers that have in recent years radically transformed scientific understanding of the evolutionary transition from dinosaur to bird. Housed in the Tianyu Museum Of Nature – the biggest dinosaur museum on Earth, according to Guinness World Records – are more than 1,100 fossilised dinosaurs, 2,300 early bird specimens and thousands of other petrified remains (including a 38-metrelong fossilised tree trunk, another record-holder) that draw palaeontologists from around the globe. “It’s an incredible museum like no other,” Jingmai O’Connor, 32, an American palaeontologist specialising in the origins of birds, said during a recent visit. “We can test a hypothesis here and the great thing is we can double-check it because they’ve got so many specimens.” The sprawling collection is a testament to China’s growing importance as a font of paleontological discoveries that are advancing the understanding of the Earth’s prehistoric eras. How so many of those discoveries ended up in the museum, which was founded in 2003 and stocked over just five years by the eccentric former head of a state-owned gold mining company, casts light on the murky
complexities of the Chinese boom in fossils, which critics bemoan has been tainted with a glut of counterfeits fabricated by unscrupulous sellers. Around 120 million years ago, most of what is now China was largely dry land. But in the northeast, a lush terrain of lakes and volcanoes proved ideal for fossil preservation. For thousands of years, people here revered the so-called dragon bones they found while tilling the soil. Under Mao Zedong, fossils were taken note of during searches for oil and gas but were not studied. “You don’t need to do too much to dig up fossils in China,” said Wang Xiaoli, a local palaeontology professor who had come to examine the museum collection. “When the wind blows, they reveal themselves.” As market economics took hold in China in the 1980s and ’90s, farmers realised they could earn a small fortune selling their finds to government officials, museums and foreign palaeontologists, particularly if they could offer complete specimens. Forgeries became rife, as did altered fossils, with a different species’ bone glued here, a rib augmented with clay there. In 1999, a Chinese fossil acclaimed by National Geographic as a “true missing link” between dinosaurs and birds was proved to be a hoax. More recently, a Chinese palaeontologist estimated that more than 80 per cent of marine reptile specimens displayed in China’s museums “have been altered or artificially combined to varying degrees”, according to a 2012 article in the state-owned China Daily newspaper. Although China has issued regulations aimed at protecting its prehistoric patrimony, fossil trafficking is not considered a serious smuggling
more tHan 80 per cent of marine reptile specimens displayed in cHina’s museums Have been altered or artificially combined to varying degrees
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despite the rampant fraud, authentic chinese fossils continue to reveal clues about dinosaurs, early avians and primitive mammals
offense, a loophole that has contributed to a rise in illegal excavations and thefts. In July, police in southern China seized 213 fossilised dinosaur eggs from a house after villagers looted a local construction site where eggs had been unearthed, state news media reported. Authorities also found the complete skeleton of a Psittacosaurus, a dinosaur that roamed the Earth around 100 million years ago. Yet despite the rampant greed and fraud, authentic Chinese fossils continue to reveal fascinating clues about dinosaurs, early avians and primitive mammals. Many discoveries have been made from studies of the Tianyu collection, including a small batlike dinosaur that may have been able to fly or glide without feathers, known as Yi qi, or “strange wing” in Mandarin, the journal Nature reported in April. All of which makes Zheng Xiaoting, the museum’s director and founder, extremely proud. “I love them all,” he said of the fossils. Modern China is increasingly populated with men like Zheng, selfmade enthusiasts who suddenly have the money to fund their obsessions. A wiry 62-year-old with a military-style flattop, he dropped out of school at 16 to find work in textile factories. It was in the early ’90s, while managing a government-run gold mine, that he discovered his love for dinosaurs. The part-time hobby eventu54 ally became the museum. He said the institution, consisting of three buildings with 28 display halls, was stateowned and required an investment of $61 million, but he would not say where the money came from. He simportfolio.
Top: Zheng Xiaoting, director and founder of the Tianyu Museum Of Nature, in a hall adorned with photos of visiting government officials
Right: A fossilised Xiaotingia zhengi, a feathered dinosaur named after Zheng Xiaoting, the founder of the Tianyu Museum
ply said, “I felt I had an obligation to protect the fossils for science.” Zheng waved away suggestions by some palaeontologists that his acquisitions were purchased, a practice that was banned in 2008. “People gave us fossils voluntarily,” he said, describing the payments the donors received as
small “rewards”. Zheng says that less than three per cent of the specimens he acquired before 2008 were altered and that most of those were returned to their owners. “There are almost no fake ones in our museum anymore,” he said.
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are hedge funders losing cultural capital? A once envied industry may be losing some of its glitter. Words: Steven Kurutz
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Christian Bale as Dr Michael Burry in The Big Short
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Turney Duff, author of the memoir The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader’s Tale Of Spectacular Excess, at home in Dix Hills, New York
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ast decade, Turney Duff lived in a $9,300-a-month triplex in the New York City neighbourhood of Tribeca. He wore jeans to work and was able to do his job largely free of the red tape that could entangle those who worked in other parts of the financial sector. As a hedge fund guy, he had the sexiest job on Wall Street. “You were part of the coolest fraternity on campus,” said Duff, who no longer works in finance. In the go-go days before the financial collapse, he and his colleagues made annual salaries in the low seven figures, and they had a shot at bringing in loads more, perhaps $1 billion a year, as top managers. “All of a sudden the word ‘billion’ became commonplace,” said Duff, 46, who chronicled his highs (and lows) in a memoir published two years ago, The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader’s Tale Of Spectacular Excess. That fizzy number is being thrown around a little less these days, as a once-enviable job has seemingly lost some of its cultural cachet. In October, hedge funds suffered their worst monthly loss since the 2008 crisis. Several well-known funds closed their doors in 2015 as big bets on oil went bust and returns sank. Increased regulation has made the work “too cumbersome”, hedge fund manager Gideon King 58 wrote to his investors, before bowing out and remaking his business as a so-called family office investment firm, following the lead of George Soros and Stanley F Druckenmiller. More hedge funds have opened in 2015 than have closed (656 to 599), according to Preqin, portfolio.
a firm that tracks the industry. But the estimated $24 billion in asset liquidation means that the
“What is more fashionable now is to work at an internet or social media company, more so than a hedge fund”
ambitious young person with a head for business is looking into other fields. Consider the post-graduation jobs of Harvard Business School students. The number who said they would like to work for a hedge fund is five per cent, a figure that has stayed flat for half a decade, said Timothy Butler, the school’s senior adviser to career and professional development. The number of graduates accepting positions in the technology sector has risen to 20 per cent, a level not seen since the late-’90s tech bubble. “The media is full of stories about startups and the big companies that are changing the world,” Butler said. “It seems tremendously exciting.” Anthony Scaramucci, who runs SkyBridge Capital, an investment firm, has noticed the trend. “What is more fashionable now is to work at an internet or social media company, more so than a hedge fund,” he said. Hedgies aren’t getting a public image boost from Hollywood, either. The Big Short, the new film based on writer Michael Lewis’ 2010 bestseller, tells of a few brilliant investors, including two hedge fund managers, who recognise the housing bubble before anyone else. Played by Steve Carell and Christian Bale, they rake in billions before the credits roll, but their victory is bittersweet. Their success depends on the US economy’s failure, and the film’s director, Adam McKay, offsets their triumph with images of laid-off workers, empty McMansions and a working-class family drummed out of its home. The socially awkward men played by Carell and Bale lack the charisma of Gordon Gekko, the
hedge funds
slick-haired protagonist played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film Wall Street. Gekko may have been intended as a villain, but he seemed to be having more fun than those who played by the rules, and he served as a role model to the young people of that era who had dollar signs in their eyes. Damian Lewis plays a rich, handsome hedge fund titan on the forthcoming Showtime series Billions. But he is hounded by Paul Giamatti as a rabid-dog district attorney – a fate that may caution those who consider entering the field. It’s telling that the coolest character in The Big Short, the one with the sharp one-liners and sharper suits (played by Ryan Gosling), is not a hedge funder but an investment banker. Although the numbers-crunching hedgies may see themselves as the finance world’s avantgarde, the public, and Hollywood, has always had a sneaking fondness for Wall Street wolves. “When you saw Michael Douglas saying ‘Greed is good,’ people could understand that,” said Bryan Burrough, a Vanity Fair correspondent and a coauthor of Barbarians At The Gate while a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Hedge funds, by contrast, “are phenomenally opaque”, Burrough said. He discovered as much Mariahilferstrasse.pdf
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“I could go out every night and not pay a thing for it”
firsthand when reporting, with Bethany McLean, an article for the magazine about Steven A Cohen, the founder of SAC Capital Advisors – “The hedge-fund billionaire,” as the piece described him. Cohen no longer runs SAC Capital. The fund pleaded guilty to insider trading charges in 2013. Even at their peak, the main hedge fund players drew media attention not so much for how they lived but for how much they earned. The milliondollar Wall Street bonuses of yore morphed little by little into the $175 million end-of-year thankyou that Paolo Pellegrini, a former analyst for Paulson & Co, is said to have received in 2007. Figures of that kind were like a blinking neon sign for would-be titans like Duff, who had his fun before washing out after two rehab stints. He is now a consultant on Billions. These days, when he talks to friends at hedge funds, he hears a lot of grousing about the newly empowered compliance people. It’s not like it used to be. “I could go out every night and not pay a thing for it,” Duff said. “Turney wants a private helicopter to the Hamptons? Done. Turney wants to go to surf camp? Done.” The job, he added, has “definitely become a little less sexy”.
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WOrK Will the Future The workplace is changing. We take a look into a world where your boss is tracking you, your neighbour is a robot, and it’s cool to be old. Employment, but not as we know it. Words: Killian Fox and Joanne O’Connor
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1 Workplace structures
Forget the rigid corporate ladder – now the corporate lattice allows free-flowing ideas and career paths Browse the business section of any bookshop and you’ll find dozens of titles promising to share the secret to climbing the corporate ladder. But the day is not far off when such books will seem as quaint and outmoded as a housekeeping manual from the 1950s. One of the key workplace trends of the 21st century has been the collapse of the corporate ladder, whereby loyal employees climbed towards the higher echelons of management one promotion at a time. Cathy Benko, vice-chairman of Deloitte in San Francisco and co-author of The Corporate Lattice, says that the ladder model dates back to the Industrial Revolution, when successful businesses were built on economies of scale, standardisation and a strict hierarchy. “But we don’t live in an industrial age, we live in a digital age. And if you look at all the shifts taking place, one [of the biggest] is the composition of the workforce, which is far more diverse in every way,” she says. This new diversity, combined with technological advances, has fed demand for a more collaborative and flexible working environment. Benko estimates that companies have “flattened out” by about 25 per cent over the past 25 years, losing several layers of management in favour of a more grid-like structure, where ideas flow along horizontal, vertical and diagonal paths. Career paths are becoming similarly fluid, with many following a zigzag rather than a straight path. “I would argue that [the lattice model] provides more opportunity and more possibilities to be successful,” says Benko. “In the ladder model, you’re looking in one direction, which is up. In the lattice organisation you can find growth by doing different roles, so you have new experiences, you acquire new skills, you tap into new networks. The world is less predictable than it was in the industrial age, so you stay relevant by acquiring a portfolio of transferable skills.” A recent report, The Future Workplace, commissioned by financial protection specialist Unum and authored by The Future Laboratory, reveals how the workplace is evolving and what employers need to do successfully to manage employee wellbeing over the next 15 years. One of the key findings of the survey was that in order to attract and retain high-calibre employees, companies need to foster a more collaborative environment. This might involve hot-desking, ideas workshops and regularly
Companies have “flattened out”, losing layers of management in favour of a grid-like structure, where ideas flow along horizontal, vertical and diagonal paths switching teams. Not only do employees respond well to this style of working, but corporations benefit too as it better equips them to compete with the startups that are disrupting their business. “Large organisations have a huge challenge in attracting the millennial generation to come and work for them. Those people expect much more entrepreneurial environments – more freedom to operate, less control,” says Philippe De Ridder, co-founder of the Board Of Innovation, a consultancy firm whose mission statement is to “help corporates innovate like start-ups”. One of the ways they do this is through a series of “intrapreneurship” programmes that encourage employees to think and act like entrepreneurs within the confines of their company. What this means in practical terms is individuals having the freedom to take full ownership of particular domains or projects, with minimal supervision or bureaucracy, and to be able to pitch directly to the CEO without having to go through several layers of management. The principles of intrapreneurship can apply at every level of an organisation, not just management or creative roles. De Ridder gives the example of online shoe shop Zappos.com, which abolished scripts from its call centre a year ago and gave customer service staff the freedom to deal with complaints however they saw fit. He says they are now outperforming most of their 63 competitors in terms of customer satisfaction ratings. “It’s a common assumption that this level of freedom only works for managers or people who work remotely,” says De Ridder. “But there are plenty of real-life examples that [show] people are more motivated if they themselves make a decision rather than having a decision forced on them.” portfolio.
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2 ArtificiAl intelligence The robots are coming – and if the forecasts are correct, they could sound the death knell for millions of jobs In recent years, automation has become increasingly prevalent. We think nothing of paying for groceries at a scanner or transferring money on a screen without going into a bank. We’ve grown accustomed to the idea of self-driving cars and computers that can talk to us. As marvellous as these innovations may seem, they can also be destructive, rendering entire professions obsolete even as they boost productivity and convenience. And now, if widespread predictions are correct, automation in the workplace is set to increase at an unprecedented rate. “There’s going to be a huge change, comparable to the Industrial Revolution,” says Jerry Kaplan, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who teaches a class in artificial intelligence at Stanford. Robots and intelligent computer systems “are going to have a far more dramatic impact on the workplace than the internet has”. Kaplan isn’t alone in this belief. A 2013 study by the Oxford Martin School estimated that 47 per cent of jobs in the US could be susceptible to computerisation over the next two decades. A study by the McKinsey Global Institute said that, by 2025, robots could jeopardise between 40 million and 75 million jobs worldwide. “There have been two major developments over the past 10 years,” says Kaplan. “The first relates to advances in machine learning – the ability to organise large volumes of data so you can get actionable intelligence. The second is the availability of data of all kinds, coming from smartphones and other low-cost sensors out there in the environment. When you add those two things up – the availability of the data along with the ability to interpret it – it enables a whole lot of things that you couldn’t do before.” Many areas of manual work are being affected. Robots in factories and warehouses are becoming more mobile, versatile and affordable. A US-designed robot called Baxter, which can handle a wide variety of tasks from loading to packaging, currently costs £19,000. “If you’re digging a ditch or painting a house, laying pipes or setting bricks – anything that involves basic hand-eye co-ordination – there will be low-cost, efficient mechanical devices that can do that work,” says Kaplan. It’s not just manual labour that’s ripe for automation: whitecollar jobs are also at risk as software becomes more sophisticated. One example is Quill, a program developed by US company Narrative Science that crunches data and generates reports in a journalistic style. Data analysis work in areas such as advertising and finance is being outsourced to computers and even the authority of medical
A study by the McKinsey Global Institute predicted that, By 2025, robots could jeopardise between 40 million and 75 million jobs experts is being challenged: IBM’s Watson computer, which won the American TV quiz Jeopardy in 2011, is being used to diagnose cancer patients in the US. Watson can sift through symptoms, medical histories and the latest research to deliver diagnoses and suggest potential treatments, but there are limits to its diagnostic abilities and, unlike a human doctor, it cannot treat patients with empathy and understanding. By absorbing the most routine aspects of our jobs, optimists argue, machines are freeing us up to concentrate on more creative, thoughtful activities. This may be true for some, but, as the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author Martin Ford says: “The reality is that a very large fraction of our workforce is engaged in activities that are, on some level routine, repetitive and predictable.” If this is the case, retraining a large portion of the workforce to engage in more creative activity beyond the reach of automation will pose an enormous challenge. Not all jobs are at risk. “A lot of work involving personal interaction won’t be affected,” says Kaplan. “Nobody wants to go to a robotic undertaker who says, ‘I’m sorry for your loss’; it’s just not meaningful. But it depends on the activity – the more transactional it is, the more likely it is to be automated. If you go to a fancy restaurant, you don’t want a robotic waiter. On the other hand if you go to McDonald’s, you won’t have a problem with punching buttons and having a burger come out of a chute somewhere.” One issue that will loom ever larger as the incidence of automation increases, according to Kaplan, is inequality. “Automation is 65 fundamentally the substitution of capital for labour. The problem is that the people who already have the capital are the ones who will benefit most, because they’re the ones who will invest in the new automation.” In other words, the rich will get richer and the rest will suffer. portfolio.
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3 The human cloud Websites that match employers with freelancers are growing fast – and so is the potential for lower wages and inequality. In the past decade cloud computing has radically altered the way we work, but it’s the growth of the “human cloud” – a vast global pool of freelancers who are available to work on demand from remote locations on a mind-boggling array of digital tasks – which is really set to shake up the world of work. The past five years have seen a proliferation of online platforms that match employers (known in cloud-speak as “requesters”) with freelancers (often referred to as “taskers”), inviting them to bid for each task. Two of the biggest sites are Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which lays claim to 500,000 “turkers” from 190 countries at any given time, and Upwork, which estimates that it has 10 million freelancers from 180 countries on its database. They compete for approximately three million tasks or projects each year, which can range from tagging photos to writing code. The market is evolving so quickly that it’s hard to pin down exactly how many people are using these sites worldwide, but management consultants McKinsey estimate that by 2025 some 540 million workers will have used one of these platforms to find work. The benefits for companies using these sites are obvious: instant access to a pool of cheap, willing talent, without having to go through lengthy recruitment processes. And no need to pay
By inviting people to bid for work, sites such as Upwork inevitably trigger a “race to the bottom”, with workers in Mumbai or Manila able to undercut their peers in Geneva or London thanks to their lower living costs
overheads and holiday or sick pay. For the “taskers” the benefits are less clear cut. Champions of the crowdsourcing model claim that it’s a powerful force for the redistribution of wealth, bringing a fresh stream of income and flexible work into emerging economies such as India and the Philippines (two of the biggest markets for these platforms). But herein lies the problem, as far as critics are concerned. By inviting people to bid for work, sites such as Upwork inevitably trigger a “race to the bottom”, with workers in Mumbai or Manila able to undercut their peers in Geneva or London thanks to their lower living costs. “It’s a factor in driving down real wages and increasing inequality,” says Guy Standing, professor of economics at SOAS, University Of London. He has written two books on the “precariat”, which he defines as an emerging global class with no financial security, job stability or prospect of career progression. He argues that falling wages in this sector, with workers often willing to complete tasks for as little as $1 an hour, will eventually have a knock-on effect on the wages of traditional employees and contribute to the growth of the precariat. “And it’s not just unskilled labour that’s being done online,” says Standing. “It goes all the way up: legal services, medical diagnosis, architectural services, accounting – it’s affecting the whole spectrum.” Love it or loathe it, the human cloud is here to stay. “People don’t necessarily want to work from 9am to 5pm in an office any more. They want more flexible work, both in terms of the hours and the location,” says Vassili van der Mersch, founder of Sevendays, a new platform which specialises in matching established freelancers with startups and digital agencies. Unlike the auction model favoured by sites like Upwork, Sevendays invites a carefully selected number of jobseekers to apply for each job and does not take a cut of their earnings. Freelancers can also specify the minimum rate they are prepared to work for. Van der Mersch argues that there are career development opportunities for cloud workers, with many startups using the site as a way of testing out freelancers to see if they’re a good cultural fit before offering them a permanent job – and vice versa. “Typically these remote freelancers are very entrepreneurial, which is one of the mindsets that startups are looking for,” he says. “They are self-starters and they don’t need someone looking over their shoulder.” For now this sector of the labour market is largely unregulated 67 but Standing says there is urgent need for an industry code of ethics and low-cost means of redress to protect vulnerable workers. “It’s going to become a very big, explosive issue. In some sectors the use of cloud labour is doubling each year and so far the policymakers haven’t addressed it.” portfolio.
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4 Workplace monitoring
Bosses apparently worry about the health of their staff and are asking them to wear trackers. Nothing sinister about that… It is becoming easier than ever for employers to keep an eye on their staff. With emerging technologies, companies can monitor where employees are and what they’re up to but also how they’re feeling – whether they’re stressed, tired or not getting enough exercise outside work. Some workplace tracking technologies are already widely used. Low-cost GPS systems are used to record the progress of delivery drivers. Earpieces relay orders to warehouse employees and can also track their performance and downtime. At Amazon, workers are encouraged to report on each other’s performance via an online feedback tool. Monitoring more intimate details about personal health and wellbeing is less commonplace, though that’s expected to change with the spread of wearable technology. Last year, sales of devices such as the Fitbit and Jawbone, which track exercise, food intake, sleep patterns and other health-related information, totalled 26.4 million; that number is expected to rise to 72.1 million by the end of this year. According to the technology research company Gartner, around 10,000 companies world-
BP gives out Fitbit fitness trackers to its North American staff as part of an incentive programme to reduce healthcare costs
wide offered their staff fitness trackers in 2014 and the firm predicts that next year most companies with more than 500 employees will offer them. Why would your employer want to know how much you exercise or how well you’re sleeping at night? “Really, it’s a management diagnostic tool,” says Chris Brauer, director of innovations at Goldsmiths, University of London. “What impacts on your performance at work is not just what you do at work. In our early stage studies, we find strong, clear correlations between sleep patterns and concentration, between levels of anxiety and stress outside the workplace and performance inside the workplace.” He draws an analogy with sports science: “If you have athletes performing at a high level on the pitch these days, they’re almost uniformly supported by data and analytics insight. Nobody would field a team in the Premier League and not use analytics.” At work, it’s also a question of competition, he says, and for companies with global ambitions “these kind of technologies are uniquely placed to provide significant competitive advantages”. Some big companies are taking this idea seriously. BP gives out Fitbit fitness trackers to its North American staff as part of an incentive programme to reduce healthcare costs. If you can prove you’ve increased your fitness – by hitting a steps-per-day target, for example – you can reduce your health-insurance premium. In the UK and Ireland, Tesco distribution centre staff, wear smart armbands “as a working aid”. Among various objections to such initiatives, perhaps the strongest has to do with invasion of privacy. Many employees object to being monitored. Even if the stated goal is to improve their health, the awareness of scrutiny and the pressure to meet targets at all times can cause anxiety, offsetting any increases in wellbeing. Further opportunities for anxiety arise. Will your employer use your data against you? Will it share it with third parties? “You’re right to be very wary and demand higher levels of transparency, especially when it comes to wearables that are much more personal 69 than other devices,” says Brauer. “If someone’s going to exploit your data for value, you need to be comfortable that the value you’re receiving back is a reasonable exchange. If you haven’t got that sense, then I don’t think many employers with that kind of strategy will survive very long.” portfolio.
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5 The end of reTiremenT
Illustrations: Roui Francisco
Forget quitting at 65 – everyone is going to have to stay on for longer, but we should exploit older people’s experience As people live longer – life expectancy at birth has increased globally by six years since 1990, according to the World Health Organisation – they are expected to work longer. This pressure comes from governments, which struggle to afford pensions for a longer-living population, and also from individuals themselves, who find it harder to make their retirement savings stretch as the average life expectancy, which is currently above 81 in the UK, rises. These trends have led to speculation that we are approaching the end of retirement or at least entering a period in which older workers will stop working gradually rather than abruptly upon reaching retirement age, which currently stands at 65 for men and 62 for women in the UK but will rise to 67 for both by 2028. For many older workers, however, remaining in employment beyond 65 is an unsettling prospect. “A certain type of older worker with sought-after skills can manage transitions from one job to another easily enough,” says Matt Flynn, the director of the Centre For Research Into The Older Workforce at Newcastle University Business School. “For them, a cliff-edge approach to retirement is probably going to be a thing of the past.” “But,” he adds, “for a lot of people, not only those in lowskill, physically demanding jobs, but also those who don’t have that much experience making job transitions, they are going to feel a real sense of loss in job security and economic security if that cliff-edge approach is taken away. Even if it’s on a more phased retirement basis, having to work longer than you planned can be quite scary.” Even for workers some way shy of retirement age, holding on to your job isn’t always easy. According to one UK survey, redundancy rates by age group in 2011 rose steeply from 5 per cent for under-30s, to 26 per cent for the 45-49 age group, to 37 per cent for those over 50. Even though legislation such as the Equality Act in the UK aims to prevent employers from discriminating on the basis of age, the odds are often stacked against older people applying for jobs. “Sometimes, when an employer has a choice between two candidates, one with up-to-date skills and another with experience and a qualification from 40 years ago, there might be some logic for a risk-averse employer to choose the first candidate,” says Flynn. “But it might also be because employers assume that younger people are more adaptable, cheaper, more tech-savvy and are going to stay with the organisation longer.”
We are entering a period in which older workers will stop working gradually, rather than abruptly upon reaching retirement age Flynn believes it’s unfair to assume that older workers are less adaptable. “One of the big reasons why people aren’t able to make very effective transitions from one job to another is that their skills aren’t up to date and a major contributor to that is not having the opportunity to train.” Individuals have to take ownership of their careers, he says, but there is also an onus on the government and employers to provide work programmes and apprenticeships to maintain a skilled older workforce. He gives the example of the Silver Human Resource Centre in Japan, which provides part-time, paid employment for people over 60; government investment in older workers that has yielded positive results. “This idea could easily be applied to a UK or US context and given a modest investment by government, making better use of skills and knowledge of older workers, could benefit the entire economy.” His assertion is backed up by a 2014 report from the 71 International Longevity Centre-UK thinktank, which estimated that, assuming continued high migration, Britain’s GDP could increase by 12 per cent by 2037 if the number of people over 65 in work continued to rise. Perhaps it’s time we started taking the senior members of our workforce more seriously. portfolio.
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In Cuba, In searCh of a CIgar 72
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Cuba’s international trade relations are improving, but cigar culture can’t really be exported Words: Ron Stodghill
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alking along the gritty, darkening streets of Havana, I felt a sense of foreboding wash over me. A few paces ahead was a stranger. Jorge, he called himself, a young street hustler I had just met at a taxi stand outside the Hotel Capri. Jorge was dressed decidedly urban: an oversize San Diego Padres jersey, baggy denim shorts and adidas shell-toe sneakers. Jorge was also charming, and through broken English he had enticed me from the touristy environs of downtown into what was eerily morphing into a barren, crumbling neighbourhood of sagging rowhouses. The object of seduction: a box of Habanos, or hand-rolled cigars. It was my first night in Havana, a trip prompted by thawing relations between the United States and Cuba. A few months before, in late December, President Barack Obama had ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations, setting in motion plans to open an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a half-century. Soon we reached a dilapidated brick building in the central neighbourhood of Vedado. “Here, my
friend,” Jorge said. “Good price here on Montecristo, and Cohiba, too.” Jorge rang a doorbell. A window two flights up opened, and keys dropped to the ground. He led me up a dim stairwell to an open apartment door, where we were greeted by a shirtless guy and an elderly woman who spirited me into a back room. And there it was on a wooden table, its lid majestically open: a box of Cuban Montecristo No 2s. “Gracias,” I told the woman, who shot me a weary smile as she wrapped my bounty in newspaper. I knew the price, 80 CUC (convertible Cuban pesos, priced to the US dollar), would spark envy in buddies back home accustomed to paying upward of $350 on the black market for a box of these gems. “You happy, my friend?” Jorge asked. I shook his hand, then hugged him as if he were family. For the average American cigar lover, Cuban smokes have remained mostly the rare indulgence; a celebratory spoil procured through mysterious back channels and offered when babies or businesses are born. Yet suddenly, the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba last July brought with it the
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prospect of a cigar renaissance, opening a path for ordinary Americans to visit and bring back, for now at least, $100 worth of Cuban cigars from tobacco’s Holy Grail. The eased sanctions put me in the mood to explore Cuba’s cigar culture, including the Alejandro Robaina Tobacco Plantation, arguably the most famous tobacco farm in the world. The home of the late farmer Alejandro Robaina, known as the face of the Cuban cigar, Robaina is tucked away in the town of San Luis in the Pinar del Río province, the most western section of Cuba. Founded in 1845, the farm is known for its robust yields of high-quality wrapper leaves; so impressive, in fact, that in the early 1980s, 74 Fidel Castro – a cigar-smoking Cohiba man himself – branded these cigars with the Robaina family name, the only Habanos to boast such a distinction. Cigar nostalgia abounds in Cuba, and I encountered few more eager to share it than Michael Phillips, a Briton who moved to Havana some 25 portfolio.
one to buy The Montecristo #2 is arguably the best cigar in the world. It is medium to full body with the perfect balance of spice and a smooth creamy taste. Invest in a box of these if you get the chance
years ago to teach English. He is a devoted member of the city’s Cigar Aficionado Club, whose members – foreign diplomats and businessmen – meet monthly for dinner, cigars and conversation. Sitting in the spacious living room of his apartment in the upscale Miramar neighbourhood, where most of the city’s top government officials reside, Phillips poured cognac and held out a tray of unbanded cigars, from short coronas to lengthier Churchills, tan Habanos to darker Maduros. He grinned at my selection, pyramid-shaped and walnut in colour. “Don’t ask me where it came from,” he said mischievously, “because I cannot tell you.” After some prodding, Phillips explained his suspiciously bandless cigar menu: “The rollers in the factory have a quota, but many of the women find a way to sneak a few extras out. So they roll for eight hours in the factory, and then come home and roll for another two hours.” He lit up, drew from his cigar, and watched the
cigars
“The rollers in The facTory have a quoTa, buT many of The women find a way To sneak a few exTras ouT”
plume rise. “There was one girl who worked at the Romeo y Julieta factory; she was pregnant for three years!” he chuckled. “But yes, these are as good as the ones from the factory.” Serious cigar smokers wax poetic with the language of wine aficionados, referring to a cigar’s flavour as spicy or creamy with hints of honey, cocoa and cinnamon. Cuba’s tobacco farmers take fierce pride in producing the most flavourful cigars in the world. Their nemesis is the expanding market not only for Cuban knockoffs but also for iconic Cuban brands whose leaves and labour are actually from other parts of the world, partly as a result of fleeing growers restarting their businesses elsewhere. For instance, the premium brand Cohiba, created exclusively in the mid-1960s for Castro and other senior government officials, has been embroiled in litigation for years as Habanos SA has contested the right of a US firm, the General Cigar Co, which manufactures Cohibas in the Dominican Republic,
to sell under the Cohiba brand. As one senior manager at TabaCuba, the state agency that runs Cuba’s tobacco production and research, told me: “A Cuban cigar must be made with Cuban sun, Cuban soil, with Cuban hands. If not, there are no properties that make it what it claims to be.” It’s estimated that some five million to eight million Cuban cigars reach Americans each year by way of countries like Canada, Switzerland, Australia and Mexico. Most experts agree that eased trade sanctions are far from opening a retail gateway between the United States and Cuba. It will take years, they say, for sellers to clear the Byzantine network of international politics, trademark restrictions and FDA regulations. When Cuban cigars finally do arrive abundantly – and 75 legally – on US soil, most experts figure it will be through the Casa del Habano, Cuba’s state-owned chain of cigar boutiques, which already has some 130 stores worldwide. Cigar culture, of course, can’t be exported. portfolio.
living
portfolio.
One&Only Hayman Island
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Portfolio.
Five-star luxury on a private island resort
H
ayman Island is located on the northernmost tip of the pristine Whitsunday Islands, surrounded by the Great Barrier Reef. Its sole resort, a fixture since the 1950s, was overhauled to the tune of $80 million by new managers One&Only Resorts. And the location is what makes this special. As well as everything you'd expect from a One&Only resort – high-end spas, restaurants, infinity pools, deluxe beach villas and so on – you get the island and surroundings. The waters are among the most spectacular on Earth for diving and snorkeling, while the walking tracks up over the island put you in contact with stunning natural environment, including kingfishers, kookaburras, painted lorikeets, white cockatoos and wallabies. A lovely mix of luxury, nature and seclusion.
Great barrier reef, australia
Price from $800
rooms 160
oneandonlyresorts. com
bNe
february issue 122
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living / style
What to pack
W
...for warm weather in Hong Kong, and beyond
Average temp
18°c
19 °C 22 °C 20 °C 23 °C Sharm El Sheikh Dubai Los Angeles Sydney
also Wear in...
february
hong kong
Avg hours of sun: four
additional info street food In the 2016 Michelin guide for Hong Kong there has been added, for the first time, a section for street food. It lists 23 places worthy of your attention including Butcher’s Club (largely known for burgers), Canaan Thai Snack (hole-in-the-wall place
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selling pad Thai) and Hop Yik Tai, which is famous for smooth rice rolls. It appears that Michelin is coming down off their lofty perch and walking the street and Hong Kong is a fine place to start. If you want a recommendation with a star, however, T’ang Court has just received it’s coveted third.
february issue 122
city look
3 2
1
5
6
4
accessories
1. Sasquatchfabrix collarless shirt $290 2. CH Carolina Herrera tie $155 3. Marvy Jamoke jacket $550 4. Berluti leather bag $3,300 5. Loro Piana PiquĂŠ Polo Shirt $625 6. Fred Perry trousers $138
TODs loafers $626
79 Salvatore Ferragamo silver pendant $1,500
Thom Browne leather card holder $338
Paul Smith shades $218
Portfolio.
living / style
what to pack ...for Rome and beyond
Average temp
9°c
7 °C 6 °C 5 °C 7 °C London Paris Venice Madrid
also wear in...
rome february
Daily hours of sunshine: eight
additional info
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One of Italy’s top spas for relaxation after a hectic time in the centre of the Eternal City
Portfolio.
the Victoria regeneration Spa A 45-minute drive from the centre of Rome on the coastal suburb of Ostia, this day spa (overlooking the sea) offers a full range of modern treatments to help you relax and forget
the three times you were almost run over by someone on a Vespa scooter. From massages and facials to treatments designed for couples and full packages designed to promote total relaxation of the five senses. Victoriaspa.it
february issue 122
city look
accessories 2
1
3
Bulgari earrings in white gold with emeralds, shaped sapphires, rubies and pavé diamonds $451,133
Stella McCartney crystal-embellished silicone iPhone 6 case $125
4 5
6
Jennifer Meyer letter 18-karat gold diamond ring $2,150
81 1. The Kooples dress with lace inserts $280 2. Saint Laurent leather-trimmed rabbit-felt fedora $1,990 3. Saint Laurent wool-crepe blazer $3,190 4. Longchamp St. Valentine bag $128 5. Jimmy Choo black mix suede with hotfix crystals $1,992 6. Alexander McQueen cat-eye acetate sunglasses $345
Kate Spade ‘Born To Fly’ bracelet $78
Portfolio.
february living / investment
issue 122
investment piece
Alden 405 Indy boots As worn by Indiana Jones, and stylish adventurers of all type
1
2
Robust upper is made of Chromexcel leather from Horween
Full glove leather lining
3
Heavy, full grain waxhide with a heavy 100 per cent cotton duck lining
8
Stacked leather sole with bottom made from a mixture of neoprene and cork
6
Constructed on a TruBalance Last for a wider, more comfortable fit
5
Mock stitch toe
82 They became the boots that Indiana Jones wears in Raiders Of The Lost Ark simply because Harrison Ford already had a pair from his days as a carpenter and just brought them to the set with him. They went on to become iconic. Regardless, every man should own a decent, well-made pair of boots and these are among the best, from one of the finest bootmakers in the world. The Alden boot company has been in business since 1884 and are true craftsmen – these aren’t fashion items. In a disposable age, these boots stand against that ethos and will mould to your foot and improve with time. They should serve you well and retail at a weighty $522, but will last you as long as you need them, whether you have to face Nazis or not. Visit aldenshop.com for more. Portfolio.
ENJOY RESPONSIBLY - DOMPERIGNON.COM
VINTAGE 2006
The Power of Creation
FEBRUARY LIVING / FOOD
ISSUE 122
Top table Asian fusion at London’s new must-try restaurant SEARED YELLOWFIN TUNA
C
hef Tim Hughes has worked with Marco Pierre White, Mark Hix and Gordon Ramsay and first became a head chef at just 24 years of age. For the last decade he's overseen all the new openings for the ever-reliable Caprice group. We point this out because what you’ve probably heard about Sexy Fish is that the likes of Kate Moss eat there and it’s a current celebrity favourite, and there are Damien Hirst and Frank Gehry artworks on display and it can be hard to get a table at a reasonable time. The latter is true, but it’s not because of who eats there, it’s because of who cooks there. The Asian-fusion menu is modern, light, fresh, inventive and everything that’s good about modern Japaneseinfluenced cuisine. And as with all the best places, the real stars are to be found in the kitchen. If you're in London, we highly recommend this place.
SEXY FISH, LONDON
1
Pickled sea cucumber Lightly seared tuna
Dried Miso
Wood sorrel
Berkley Square, London W1
sexyfish.com
LHR
2
3
MARBLE CAKE
OCTOPUS CARPACCIO
Deserts in Asian-fusion restaurants are often lacking but this matcha and ginger marble cake with gingerbread ice cream and caramel sauce is a fine, decadent ending to a meal.
Their octopus carpaccio comes with a lime and ginger vinaigrette and pickled shallots. In one of the most no-carb restaurants in the capital, this is a stand-out dish.
CHEF’S RECOMMENDATION | TIM HUGHES' PICK OF THREE RESTAURANTS TO TRY 1. Kaia Kaipe (San Sebastian) A small provincial restaurant, overlooking the Bay of Biscay – serves exceptionally fresh fish straight from the sea, prepared by a host of Spanish women in the kitchen. Can’t fault it. 2. Gramercy Tavern (New York) What Danny Meyers manages to execute here never fails to amaze me. They manage to produce an extraordinarily high volume of covers, with produce second to none and consistent quality. 3. Barrafina (London) A concept I really enjoy, and similar to what we’ve built at Caprice Holdings; small plates, sharing and using exceptionally fresh seafood, by one of the best female cooks (Nieves Barragan Mohacho ) I’ve ever come across. PORTFOLIO.
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living / book
Wrapped Reichstag C
hristo and Jeanne-Claude conceived the idea of wrapping the Berlin Reichstag back in 1971, but it took until the summer of 1995, when for two weeks the German capital seemed the very centre of the art world, for the scheme to come to fruition. More than five million visitors witnessed the final making of one of the most famous acts of art that has been performed, one that took 24 years to set up and cost around $10 million to do. This book tells the story of how this feat was developed and designed by the artists and their project co-ordinator Wolfgang Volz. It includes sketches, preliminary drawings, documents, and photos on 700 pages how a vision to do something that would be as much a political statement as an art stunt. This is the story of how two artists, with 100,000 square metres of thick woven polypropylene fabric and 15.6 kilometres of blue polypropylene rope, pulled off one of the most memorable art events of all time. So what did wrapping the 101-year-old German parliament building in aluminium-coloured fabric symbolise? “All our work is about freedom,” the artist said, but like much art, it’s up to you. Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971-95, published by Taschen, is out now for $40
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living / stay
Hyde Park Corner, London SW1X 7TA
Price
From $1,050 per night
Lanesborough.com
LHR
88
Portfolio.
F
ormerly home to England’s Second Viscount Lanesborough and later a fully-functioning hospital, the site that houses The Lanesborough, originally opened in all its Regency-style glory in 1991, has a storied past to say the least. Last year, a new chapter of its tale commenced with the hotel’s reopening as part of the acclaimed Oetker Collection. This followed an extravagant 18-month refurbishment that saw the hotel stripped to its shell, and is rumoured to have cost its owners the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority upwards of $100 million. The result, as you can imagine, is none too shabby. At the helm of the renovation was globally celebrated interior designer Alberto Pinto, who sadly passed away in 2012, shortly after completing the renderings. His sister Linda Pinto was tasked with bringing his vision to life, and maintaining the hotel’s signature Regency style and private residence feel, while incorporating the latest in contemporary luxury and technological innovations, with new designs in all of its public areas, and 93 guest rooms, suites and bathrooms. A team of over 300 artisans using ageold techniques, often used in decorating palaces, were entrusted to deliver the new look, from embroiderers, crystal
You are welcomed to your room by a private butler, it’s the only london hotel to offer this for every guest
specialists and bronzers, to lacquerers, gilders and (probably) candlestick makers. With made to measure trimmings and finishings, the meticulous attention to detail, achieved only in part due to 2,000 hours of stencilling, 16,000 metres of fabric and 2,100 books of 23¼ carat gold leaf, is staggeringly tangible. Using largely British materials, the look and feel is so wonderfully pretty and quintessentially British, you expect a rendition of God Save The Queen to ring out as you enter the lobby. Of course it doesn’t, and instead you are welcomed to your room or suite, of which no two are the same, by one of 23 private butlers; the only London hotel to offer such a service for every guest. The Royal Suite is The Lanesborough’s largest, offering seven bedrooms and bathrooms, two living rooms and a dining room.
Words: Hannah George
the lanesborough
Where to stay
february issue 122
in the hotel
The new restaurant, Céleste, marks a new culinary era for the hotel under executive chef Florian Favario, who hails from The Lanesborough’s sister hotel, Le Bristol, Paris’ three-Michelin starred restaurant, Epicure, and is the protégé of chef patron Eric Frechon, who oversees the French-inspired cuisine, made using the best of British ingredients. Dining here is a formal affair under the glint of a 200kg English crystal chandelier, complemented by the more relaxed, yet equally as ceremonious afternoon tea, with a tea sommelier on hand to guide you through the menu. The eccentrically named ‘Withdrawing Room’ and the adjacent Library Bar maintain the grandeur, the latter with hues of dark green, gold and mahogany, dimmed lighting and an evening pianist providing a private members’ club ambience; and an exclusive one at that. Like all the best hotels, you don’t feel like a customer, but rather an old friend from the host’s Oxbridge days who’s visiting. And as with all illustrious residencies, one of the best-kept secrets lies in the basement. The Garden Room is a denlike cigar lounge, boasting a sizable selection of Cuban cigars in its walk-in humidor, and a partially opened roof provides a literal breath of fresh air from the Knightsbridge streets above. If the best of British heritage, design, luxury and service are your thing, The Lanesborough is everything you could imagine and more.
Bar
Bath
extra touch
The Library Bar once hosted Stevie Wonder, who asked a former barman to craft him a bespoke cocktail – in return providing an impromptu 30-minute set on the bar’s piano. The Champagne Wonder is on the menu today. Placed in every guest bathroom, where each slab of marble was individually handpicked, are bespoke fragrances and amenities, created by worldrenowned British perfumer Roja Dove.
Five colour schemes adorn the rooms and suites, with rich jewel colours of greens, blues, reds and yellows to create warmth, harmony and comfort. Bedtime is a regal affair with 14 canopies hanging over each bed, with more than three million hand stitches piecing together the fabrics.
places of interest in the area eat
drink
shop
culture
The Alfred Tennyson is a friendly, rustic gastro-pub where the focus is on high-quality British produce. Located a stone’s throw from the hotel on the quiet, cobbled Motcomb Street, it serves as a welcome refuge from the hustle and bustle of Knightsbridge.
Beneath 56 Walton Street is Jeroboam’s Wine Cellar, an intimate, atmospheric space that hosts an entertaining programme of wine tastings throughout the year, alongside an award-winning wine list and a roaring open fire in winter.
Moda Operandi offers a more personalised experience than the neighbourhood’s famous department stores. The luxurious showroom provides a bespoke shopping service with access to the premier fashion houses and emerging labels within a relaxed ambience, alongside advice from personal stylists.
Marvel at the glittering interiors of Apsley House, located at the grandest address once known as ‘Number 1 London’. The Georgian building was the London home of the first Duke Of Wellington and now hosts one of the finest art collections as well as an impressive array of silver and porcelain.
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february living / column
issue 122
What Pantone’s colours of 2016 mean for design By Ryan Russell Pantone, the global authority on colour standards for the design industries, recently announced its colours of the year for 2016: Rose Quartz and Serenity. It’s the first time Pantone has chosen the blending of two shades instead of one (past choices include Marsala, Radiant Orchid and Emerald). According to the company, by breaking from tradition, it hopes to “transcend cultural and gender norms”. In its choice, Pantone seems to be suggesting doing away with the practice of associating colours with gender – something that’s actually a relatively recent phenomenon, and can restrict the colours designers use. For decades, pink has been associated with girls and blue with boys. Could Pantone’s decision to focus on gender influence the designs of everything, from clothing to house paints? There is nothing intrinsically female about the colour pink, nor is there anything intrinsically male about the colour blue. Rather, popular culture – and buckets of advertising dollars – have largely dictated how we perceive the colourgender relationship. At various points in history, these gendercolour connections have actually had opposite roles. The colour pink has historically been a masculine colour. Blue, a colour that is associated with the Virgin Mary, was historically considered feminine – and still is in many parts of the world. The colour order that we’ve become accustomed to wasn’t established until the 1940s, when gender-specific clothing began being dictated by manufacturers and retailers. Eventually, boys and girls required different clothes, different toys – even different interior designs in their rooms and nurseries. Popular products like Barbie (primarily marketed to young females) would end up playing a role in shaping our colour stereotypes. With the arrival of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s, fashion shifted away from gender-specific clothing as girls embraced more
masculine styles. A decade later, fashion moved toward a more neutral palette. There was even a two-year stretch in the 1970s when no pink clothing appeared in the Sears, Roebuck and Co catalogue. In the 1980s, we witnessed a shift towards gender-specific colour purchases, especially for children. With the advent of prenatal testing, families could now plan farther in advance in preparation for the expected baby girl or boy. Even disposable diapers were sold in pink and blue. Today we’re more connected than ever – and more sceptical about the advertising we’re exposed to. Consumers have become increasingly sensitive to the methods used to reinforce these social conventions in order to bolster profits. We’re also in the midst of a movement to narrow the gender divide, particularly in fashion. The burgeoning trend of genderless fashion is being dictated by a new generation of individuals who accept styles without the traditional boundaries. They recognise that their role as a consumer is not just about the product, but rather about being a part of a larger movement. The combination of Serenity and Rose Quartz was featured on the runways for both men and women and highlighted in the Pantone Fashion Colour Report Spring 2016. This will inevitably bleed into other areas of design, from interiors to products. When conveying meaning and purpose to consumers, products and packages may abandon the use of traditional gender-colour associations. As we’ve seen, the colour-gender link isn’t concrete. The boundaries built by generations before us could soon be knocked down. With this year’s selection, Pantone is among a select few wielding a hammer. By recognising the cultural and “societal movements towards gender equality and fluidity”, Pantone is paving the way for future generations to be less concerned about being typecast or judged for embracing unexpected and unique colours.
“The colour order that we’ve become accustomed to wasn’t established until the 1940s”
90 Ryan Russell is the associate professor of graphic design, Pennsylvania State University Portfolio.
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