We Shouldn’t Always Need a “Business Case” to Do the Right Thing

– Harvard Business Review 

While there is a business case for integrity, an organization that embraces it must make a conscious decision to prioritize the long term, the intangible, and the existential over the specific and measurable. A growing body of evidence shows that ethical companies outperform financially over time, but trying to translate such a broad finding into the short-term planning metrics used by most businesses is perilous.

 

Howard Schultz: Companies Need to Balance Profit and Conscience

– Axios 

Howard Schultz, who rose from the projects in Brooklyn to create Starbucks, is making it a personal mission to find jobs for some of the least-advantaged and, in his view, most deserving in the United States: veterans and their families, refugees, and, with a job fair today, young people who are neither going to school nor working. Why it matters: Schultz is attempting to pull a much-overlooked segment of U.S. society into the work force at a time that public hostility is driven in large part by low and stagnant salaries, and deep pockets of joblessness in inner cities and rust belts.

 

Global Plan to Streamline ‘Use By’ Food Labels Aims to Cut Food Waste

– NPR

An estimated 133 billion pounds of food is wasted in the U.S. each year, enough to fill Chicago’s Willis Tower 44 times. One major culprit? The confusion over “date” labels on foods. Once a “sell by” date has passed, lots of us have tossed out food that’s perfectly safe to eat. The typical family in the U.S. spends about $1,500 on food that is thrown away. This adds up to billions of dollars of waste. A new initiative aims to harmonize “use by” labels around the globe.

 

A Radar for Industrial Robots May Guide Collaboration with Humans

– MIT Technology Review 

Working alongside an industrial robot can be frustrating and even downright dangerous. But a new sensing system could make human-robot collaboration a cinch. Humatics, an MIT spinout, is developing an indoor radar system that should give robots and other industrial systems the ability to track people’s movements very precisely. This could make industrial systems significantly safer, make it possible to track worker performance in greater detail, and lead to more effective new forms of collaboration between people and machines.