“The basic math is whatever product you have, you divide it by .3, and that’s what the product should cost to the consumer to operate at that healthy margin,” Brafman told Fox News Digital. “If the prices continue to increase, there’s only [so much] that the consumer will be willing to pay.”. //

“I think about margins less than percentages,” he said.

His approach often means absorbing part of the cost to preserve the dining experience.

“At the end of the day, we’re in the business of taking care of people, nourishing them, making them feel good … and making them feel good about spending money. That’s our job.”

Earlier this year, Herschend agreed to buy Palace Entertainment and its 20 U.S. parks across 10 states from European theme park company Parques Reunidos. While Herschend may not be a household name, many theme park enthusiasts know some of its biggest assets, including Dollywood, Silver Dollar City, the Harlem Globetrotters, and Kentucky Kingdom.

The acquisition gave Herschend some of the country’s best-known theme parks, including Kennywood and Dutch Wonderland in Pennsylvania and Lake Compounce in Connecticut, America’s first theme park. Herschend Parks averages around 20 million visitors annually, putting it on par with United Parks and Resorts, owners of Busch Gardens and SeaWorld, who average around 21 million visitors annually.

However, Dollywood is the crown jewel of Herschend’s theme parks. The Dolly Parton creation is routinely voted the best theme park in America, beating out giants like Disney World and the Universal Orlando Resort.

A RACI chart (RACI matrix) clarifies roles and responsibilities, making sure that nothing falls through the cracks. RACI charts also prevent confusion by assigning clear ownership for tasks and decisions.

RACI charting is easy (here’s the Excel file for the one below).

• RACI is a project management acronym for the different responsibility types within a project: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.
• The RACI matrix, or RACI chart, clarifies the roles named individuals or groups will play in the successful delivery of the project.
• Accurate RACI matrices help ensure a project’s success before it even begins.

This supposed falling out may be making a mountain out of a molehill. In 1931, the American chewing gum model William Wrigley Jr., speaking to "The American Magazine," said:

Business is built by men who care—care enough to disagree, fight it out to a finish, get facts. When two men always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

The frustration has reached a point where AI companies themselves are backing away from their own technology during the hiring process. Anthropic recently advised job seekers not to use LLMs on their applications—a striking admission from a company whose business model depends on people using AI for everything else. //

However, this trend from businesses has led to an arms race of escalating automation, with candidates using AI to generate interview answers while companies deploy AI to detect them—creating what amounts to machines talking to machines while humans get lost in the shuffle. //

So perhaps résumés as a meaningful signal of candidate interest and qualification are becoming obsolete. And maybe that's OK. When anyone can generate hundreds of tailored applications with a few prompts, the document that once demonstrated effort and genuine interest in a position has devolved into noise.

Instead, the future of hiring may require abandoning the résumé altogether in favor of methods that AI can't easily replicate—live problem-solving sessions, portfolio reviews, or trial work periods, just to name a few ideas people sometimes consider (whether they are good ideas or not is beyond the scope of this piece). For now, employers and job seekers remain locked in an escalating technological arms race where machines screen the output of other machines, while the humans they're meant to serve struggle to make authentic connections in an increasingly inauthentic world.

Perhaps the endgame is robots interviewing other robots for jobs performed by robots, while humans sit on the beach drinking daiquiris and playing vintage video games. Well, one can dream. //

OldPhartReef Ars Centurion
12y
225
Subscriptor
You can skip all the AI silliness by just going back to old-fashioned relationship building. You know, the human-2-human; face-2-face kind?

Smack me now for such a stupid idea. //

fuzzyfuzzyfungus Ars Legatus Legionis
12y
10,222
I'd be a lot more sympathetic if Team HR hadn't been using fairly extensive(if less technically trendy) tooling for auto-screening resumes for keywords and such and just silently binning any that don't meet criteria; and (at least judging by the hype) they were all on board with 'AI-enabled' resume screening as well.

Obviously an arms race is a loss for everyone involved; but let's not pretend that there was some sort of bucolic non-broken state before people started huffing LLMs.

You could feel the tension—passengers staring at their watches, refreshing airline apps, sighing loudly, and shifting uncomfortably in their seats.

After we had all boarded and settled into the growing frustration of the unknown, the pilot stepped out of the cockpit, walked into the cabin, stood where we could all see him, and addressed the entire plane face-to-face.

“I want to start with an apology,” he said.

Just one sentence—seven words, to be precise—is all it took to make a huge difference in the overall experience for everyone on board. Nothing about the delay was his fault. Pilots don’t schedule thunderstorms or control air traffic flow. He hadn’t caused the delay, and he certainly wasn’t to blame for the chain reaction it was causing in all of our carefully planned travel itineraries. But he still began with an apology.

In that moment, the mood on the plane shifted. The pilot didn’t magically make the delay go away, and it didn’t guarantee that everyone would make their connection, but it did something almost as powerful—it made everyone feel seen. It made everyone on the plane feel like someone understood how frustrating the situation was and cared enough to acknowledge it. //

What the captain did at that moment offers three lessons every leader should remember:

He came to us

He started with empathy

He made it clear he was on our side

The tax code encourages airlines to charge separately for checked bags, and Southwest Airlines was easily leaving $75 million in tax savings on the table each year by refusing to do so. //

The airline’s CEO Bob Jordan has essentially capitulated to activist investor Elliott in order to save his job, but at the expense of the airline’s culture and product differentiation. These changes won’t make Southwest Airlines better. Southwest had problems – Elliott and everyone else in the world observing them were not wrong – but there are no solutions to bring Southwest back to its earlier growth days because the model has simply run its course.

They have maxed out the ability to grow with a single fleet type, distributing tickets through their own channels, going it alone with a simplified product. So any future will be a lower growth, lower stock multiple, less valuable one. But that doesn’t have to mean doubling down on the race to the bottom, which is why it’s sad to see today’s change. //

Ultimately what this underscores is that there is no returning to the differentiated airline business model that gave Southwest significantly higher earnings multiples, catapulting their stock beyond peers, and generating decades of consistent profits.

Nobody had solutions, so they gave up and did what everyone else does which is what company executives do to protect their jobs. They stopped sticking their necks out, because they might get chopped off. Southwest is now just like everyone else, but a bit less (they don’t even plan to sell blocked middle seats, let alone first class; they have less valuable miles; they don’t have lounges; their wifi lags the industry). A moment of silence for this once great company. //

In the meantime, as checked bag fees roll out to tickets purchased May 28 onward, over the next few months we’ll begin to see everyone trying to carry all their bags on board. That’ll mean more gate checking of bags, which has meant Southwest needed to retrofit gate equipment. This will slow down boarding and delay flights. Good luck out there to Southwest customers!

if the deal goes through it would create the world's third-largest OEM in 2026. //

Beleaguered automaker Nissan is going to throw its lot in with Honda. The two Japanese OEMs want to merge by 2026, creating the world's third-largest car company in the process. In fact, earlier this year the two signed memorandums of understanding to create a strategic partnership focused on software and electrification. Now, the changing business environment calls for deeper integration, they say. //

Altaira Pilgram
This merger is about the rise of Chinese auto companies affecting their domestic markets and for now exports across Asia soon to be global. Over the last few years Chinese domestic auto manufacturers have gutted the sales of companies like GM, VW, and others in China and are now looking to aggressively reshape the international automobile markets. BYD for example is building factories Thailand, Hungary, and Brazil. Nissan, by its own estimates, has said at times it was unclear if it would last through 2027 if it stayed independent thus forcing it to seek out of desperation a strong partner. It also seems the Japanese government had a hand in propping up Nissan with this merger presumably with the goal of protecting its economy and jobs. The hope here is that the merged companies can pool R & D resources to develop not just finished cars but the myriad technologies and finished components that go into them in an timely manner, at scale and at costs that allow them to compete with the Chinese manufacturers. To me it is unclear that any of this is going to work. Saddling Honda with a duplicate but a worse company has to bog them down for years while they figure out what Nissan parts to keep and which parts to shutdown precisely when Honda needs to be nimble. The game of thrones, automobile edition, has begun in earnest.
December 23, 2024 at 4:46 pm

11 companies built around a single product: //

Success isn't about doing everything.

It's about doing ONE thing better than anyone else.

You don't need a list of products or a suite of services to be successful.

You can do more with less.

The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) is an aggressive domestic program to federally register millions of unsuspecting small business owners under the guise of an “anti-money laundering initiative.”

By the end of this year, Americans will be required to hand over their small businesses’ private data — such as owners’ names and home addresses — to the federal government’s law enforcement database, operated by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), housed under the Department of the Treasury. Such small businesses include limited liability companies, corporations, “and any other entities created by the filing of a document with a secretary of state or any similar office in the United States.” //

The true goal of CTA appears to be setting up yet another new database of citizens to monitor, observe, and punish. The federal government is moving quickly to implement the CTA, as millions of small business owners in the United States have no idea this law even exists (only 13 percent of businesses in California, 5 percent in Ohio, and 4 percent in Pennsylvania have registered). Millions of businesses owners face becoming felons in three months unless they comply.

There are currently seven separate lawsuits challenging the validity of the law. Last year, the House of Representatives passed a bill to give businesses more time to comply, but the bill is sitting in the Senate going nowhere. A recent email from their accountant may have been the first time many businesses realized this law exists. The legal confusion and seeming lack of urgency to inform the public suggest that FinCEN’s true intent is to “catch” millions of small business owners in “non-compliance” so that they can be investigated and audited by Department of the Treasury and punished. Serious criminals will not be concerned about paperwork violations. Mandatory compliance is required by January 1, 2025, or business owners will be subjected to hefty fines of $591 dollars per day (or up to 10 percent of a company’s annual receipts) and up to two years in federal prison. //

President Trump vetoed this unconstitutional power grab, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021, but his veto was overridden. In an unprecedented act of overreach, the feds are moving to collect data on all small business owners, who make up the backbone of the U.S. economy, for reasons that seem murky at best. And the information collected goes to FinCEN, the counterterrorism arm of the Treasury. Business owners have to register with a terrorism department. This seems to infer criminality on millions of law-abiding citizens.

Under CTA, for-profit business entities with fewer than 20 employees and under $5 million in revenue are in the crosshairs. But businesses that make more than $5 million annually, or employ more than 20 full-time employees, are exempt from this invasive self-reporting requirement that could put owners in prison. That means BlackRock, Amazon, Facebook, Pfizer, etc., can operate “business as usual,” but “Grandma’s Donut Shop” will be required to show her “paper’s please” if she wants to make a living. //

Business registration and entity creation has always been handled at the state level through State Corporation Commissions. With the CTA, even though a business is a registered entity at the state level, if it does not then self-report and register into a criminal database at the federal level, owners will not be able to operate the business. The federal government is overreaching into a state rights issue and creating a massive database in violation of the commerce clause. State attorneys general in every state should be weighing in on this issue. Unfortunately, their silence is deafening.

Re: Ahh a manager who is telling the truth
"Transparency in organisations is a rare thing."

But those times you come across it, it's a wonderful thing to behold! People know what's going on, know where the delays and problems are, they help out, and things usually get done more quickly and properly. It's sad that's so rare. Mainly because of empire builders worried more about their reputation than the project.

BadSuperblock Ars Praefectus
15y
3,125

rbtr4bp said:
I think there is an argument that SpaceX, as a new and agile company with something to prove, is going to do things better. People who are willing to accept more risk are attracted to the new "startup" and willing to work harder for the same or less money because of the adventure and excitement.
...

No, it doesn’t necessarily follow that this incompetence was a consequence of "maturing." It is not a foregone conclusion. For one thing, what is your definition of "mature"? We think of technology companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Intel to be "mature" because they are now going on 40 years old. Well, since Boeing was founded in 1916, by the time they were 50 years old in 1966, Boeing was taking some of the biggest, most rewarding, and most admired engineering risks and innovations of their entire history: Projects like components for the Apollo moon program, and the absolutely revolutionary and widely loved 747 airliner. This company, half a century old, was creating these exciting, "startup" quality projects. At that time, they were more "mature" than the companies we now call mature, but they had not lost their innovative spirit, engineering discipline, and quality control.

It is generally agreed that the root cause of the Boeing malaise was not the age of the company, but the decision of one CEO and board to allow McDonnell Douglas management to take over Boeing, instituting the changes that poisoned the company. In other words, it was not a rot from within, but a culture change imposed by outsiders.

According to the FTC, approximately 18 million workers in America are covered by these agreements, which equates to roughly 30 million people. This final ruling would eliminate all new noncompete agreements for workers and it would force these companies to allow current and former employees know that they won’t enforce them.

Additionally, they will also have to eliminate existing agreements for most employees, although the agreements may remain in effect for senior executives. //

Pro-business groups like the Chamber of Commerce all say that the rule targets businesses that are simply trying to prevent intellectual property or information and also calls into question the FTC's authority to retroactively kill agreements that were made before they voted to eliminate the rule. //

The two dissenting commissioners on the FTC both say that they don't support non-compete agreements entirely across the board, however, they do believe that the FTC lacks the authority to enact such a ruling without first getting Congress to enact legislation to do so.

21 days
Terry 6Silver badge
Reply Icon
One, additional, thing I pull out of that is that company's understanding of "training". It's not training until the point that the trainee has actually been observed ( and coached if required) to actually perform the task and deal with any issues- more than once.

Because 1) Theory is never the same as practice. 2) Even the best trainer will abbreviate, elide or just plain miss some steps, because they have at least some parts of the process ingrained and automated so they don't think about it. And 3) Even the best trainee will miss, misunderstand, forget or confuse some bits because we're only human, we have limited short term memory and concentration, and because that's what we do.. //

20 days
Jou (Mxyzptlk)Silver badge
Reply Icon
The training you complain about is what I call "bulimic learning". Binge in, purge out, forgotten. Most useless style, but that is what the world seems to want instead of knowledge and understanding of a subject.

I usually write a lot up, on paper, during important things to learn. Once it got through my head and out of my hand it stays better in my mind. Though that does not fit the usual "2 Minutes read" the teaching material says on top. //

Sherrie Ludwig
Reply Icon
It's not training until the point that the trainee has actually been observed ( and coached if required) to actually perform the task and deal with any issues- more than once.

I have always gone by the motto, "see one, do one, teach one", repeat until the "teach one" can be at least explained fully to a person unacquainted with the system as a whole. //

An_Old_DogSilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: The Reason So Many People Automatically Hate All Managers
a non-interfering incompetent one woud be refreshing.

There are three types of managers. In order of descending desirability they are:

Type I: Competent/Active

Type II: Incompetent/Inactive

Type III: Incompetent/Active //

Julz
Reply Icon
Hey
What about us Competent/Inactive managers?

8 days
Lee DSilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: The first one is free
The problem with fancy interview questions is that you are only testing whether people can answer fancy interview questions.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy - you're selecting candidates based on some arbitrary criteria which is only vaguely related to their job, so the candidate who "does best" may not actually be good at anything vaguely related to the actual job they need to do.

I've always held that job interviews should be little more than "We pay you for a day, you work with us for a day". Anything else is nonsense. All those lateral thinking and logic tests (which, incidentally, I'm amazing at, being a mathematician) will knock out people who would have been great at the job if it wasn't for that test. All those impressive answers someone gives in interviews where they turn a perceived problem with themselves on its head and make you think they're wonderful? Congratulations you've hired a very good BS'er. All those interview that utterly impress the management types with management-level BS, while all the people who are hands-on, in the field, etc. are completely hating them? If you go ahead, you've hired someone good at speaking managementese who's going to be hated by their underlings and co-workers.

The interview is a selection process - and a two-way one at that! You have to consider "What am I selecting for with this question?" but more importantly "What am I selecting for when I'm looking at the answer?". Because a simple technical question may well be useful to "get right", but someone who admits they don't know, asks if they've be allowed to research the answer, takes a decent stab, tells you what they are sure of and what they are not based on their previous knowledge/experience, and can state where they'd go to get a definitive answer... I'd rather have that guy. I want to select for their METHOD and their communication and honesty, rather than that they don't know what menu the button is under to restart a cluster, or whatever.

Interviews are a selection process. Select for what you want to see, not some arbitrary score system of nonsense. Because like natural selection, if you cull perfectly good applications based on random nonsense and/or the highest-scoring person is just someone lucky, then you're going to end up evolving entirely the wrong direction compared to what you actually want to happen.

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