We Need To Stop Pretending Work-Life Balance Is A Woman's Issue

It’s time for everyone to come out of the closet.

Not that closet. I’m talking about the white-collar trap where those of us who wish to have lives outside of the office hide our true feelings and instead fake like we’re working all the time. Most of us have a foot in that closet, pretending to some extent that being tethered to our email 24/7 has somehow freed us up to have personal lives.

This thought hit home after reading some research about a prominent consulting firm where many men pretend to work 80-hour weeks, so that they are still regarded as star employees.

These men have the same kind of work-family balance issues that women face, but the guys' problems get a lot less attention. And that's a shame.

“Work-life balance issues aren’t just women’s issues. Even in elite jobs, men are experiencing challenges at the same rate as women, but because we expect different things from men and women, men develop different strategies,” Erin Reid, an assistant professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business who conducted this study, told The Huffington Post.

Reid and other researchers interviewed 82 consultants at the firm, which she's dubbed AGM (a pseudonym). She also looked at consultants’ performance reviews and talked to former employees. Reid wrote about her findings in the Harvard Business Review and in a longer paper for the journal Organization Science. They were later reported by the New York Times.

The culture at AGM, like many big consulting firms and law firms, is all about putting in the hours. Consultants are expected to commit themselves wholly to the work and be available at any time to both clients and the firm to get the job done: 60 to 80-hour workweeks are the norm.

One consultant puts it this way in Reid’s paper:

You know AGM people, we’re on our BlackBerries. We’re thinking about our work 24/7. I mean, maybe you tune out for a little while here and there, but AGM people work all the time, all the time. I mean, you wake up at night, you’re dreaming about it. The first thing you do is you pick up your BlackBerry, you’re on it through the morning. You get to the office, you’re working through the day, you sit at your desk, you know, you’re cancelling plans.

The more of a committed, extreme player you are, the bigger your rewards, the better your performance rating and the quicker you’re promoted.

Lots has been written about how this kind of culture punishes women, particularly mothers. Less attention has been paid to how it affects men.

“The main takeaway seems to be that these jobs require you to work all the time, and women have difficulty but men don’t. That didn’t resonate with people that I knew in my life,” Reid told HuffPost this week, in explaining why she did the study. “The men I know aren’t super happy working all the time.”

A majority of the male consultants Reid interviewed were miserable with the always-on mentality. Some complained “of children crying when they missed their soccer games, of poor health and substance addictions caused by how they worked, and of a general sense of feeling 'overworked and underfamilied,'” Reid writes.

The women at the firm -- mothers especially -- weren’t quite expected to work as hard as the men. The HR department had formal policies to help them -- women asked for reduced work hours, took maternity leave, etc. Those accommodations came with penalties, according to Reid's study. Women who asked for flexibility weren't considered “true ideal workers,” she writes. “They were consequently marginalized within the firm.”

The men who asked for formal help were also dinged. One asked for a three-month unpaid paternity leave, something his employer is legally bound to offer thanks to the Family Medical Leave Act. “I felt like this was the only time in my career I would be able to do this,” he told Reid. “But the original reaction I actually got inside of the firm was 'oh no, you can’t take three months off.'"

He settled for six weeks unpaid -- and worked hard the rest of the year. Didn’t help. He was passed over for a promotion because, his supervisor said, they couldn’t evaluate his performance that year with such a big gap in his employment.

Many other men at AGM -- and a few women -- figured out a new way to get the balance they wanted: faking it. They figured out how to structure their work so it looked like they were putting in 80 hours -- but really were closer to 50.

Men found local clients that required less travel. They strategically emailed at off hours so it looked like they were pulling all-nighters or working weekends -- a maneuver I’m sure many of us can relate to.

One man described taking his family on a five-day ski trip -- on work time. From Reid's study:

“I skied five days last week. I took calls in the morning and in the evening but I was able to be there for my son when he needed me to be, and I was able to ski five days in a row,” he tells Reid. He clarified that these were work days, not vacation days: “No, no one knows where I am…. Those boundaries are only practical with my local client base.… Especially because we’re mobile, there are no boundaries.”

On Facebook, one of my friends was inspired by the fakers: “Women, here's what we can learn from men, don't ask for permission but do what you need to do to be successful at work and at home," she wrote when sharing the piece.

But maybe the path to success doesn’t start with everyone pretending that a 24/7 culture is OK and trying to fit their lives into it.

Imagine if more and more workers simply rebelled against the culture of face time? Or if firms like AGM started to understand that people can have lives outside the office -- and still be devoted workers.

“Organizations need to change,” said Reid, who has been hearing from lots of people for whom AGM's culture resonated all too well. Elite firms should perhaps not have the default expectation that workers put in 60-hour weeks and be available to travel at the drop of a hat, Reid said.

Still she doesn’t expect any changes at AGM. The firm may now understand it has a problem, but Reid said that it hasn't done much about it since she presented her results to the firm back in 2011.

The Way We Shop Has Completely Transformed In The Last 10 Years. Here's Why.

In 2005, shopping malls reigned supreme. There were a handful of online-only retailers, but they were nascent, at best.

A lot has changed over the last decade.

Now, the teeming centers that once drew urban and suburban shoppers are giving way to denser complexes built to house retail locations, commercial offices and residential space.

“Almost nobody is building malls. They are building ‘alls,’” said Paco Underhill, CEO of the retail consultancy Environsell, in an interview with The Huffington Post. “If you think of the typical American mall, how many have a grocery store? A drugstore? A hardware store? A place to get your laundry done? The answer is none of them.”

Younger consumers crave the convenience of stores within walking or biking distance of where they live. They want "alls," not traditional shopping malls.

“Many millennials would love to be in a place where they can live, work and shop and never have to step into their cars,” said Underhill.

Luxury malls, located in wealthy areas and containing mostly high-end retailers, have fared well since the Great Recession, but the wider industry is suffering. Nearly one-fifth of the country’s non-outdoor malls have vacancy rates of 10 percent or higher, according to The New York Times. The paper reports that over 3 percent of malls are thought to be dying, meaning that 40 percent or more of their stores are vacant. In 2006, that description applied to less than 1 percent of malls.

Underhill, a popular commentator on the future of retail, said that on Friday he will speak to a group of chief executives of the country’s biggest mall operators, explaining to them the importance of reconfiguring existing mall spaces to accommodate millennials' new, multifaceted demands.

"What we're watching is the better treatment of the art and science of building and managing commercial spaces," he said.

The rise of "alls" replacing malls looks likely to continue for the next decade or so.

“They’re essentially higher-end versions of strip malls,” Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at the market research firm Forrester Research, told HuffPost. “It’ll probably be like this for at least the next decade, if not the next two decades.”

Part of what has eroded the popularity of malls is the rise of the Internet -- a one-stop shop with every kind of inventory imaginable. Online shopping has skyrocketed since 2005.

“It’s a lot more Amazon now,” Mulpuru said. “That’s the single biggest difference.”

Last year, the fourth-quarter e-commerce sales in the United States topped $79.6 billion, up 14.6 percent from the same period in 2013, according to data from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Holiday season e-commerce sales have grown steadily since 2005.

Computers are much more sophisticated now than they were in 2005, of course -- and their users are, too. Plus, countless numbers of online retailers have cropped up in the past decade.

“In 2005, maybe there were 10 sites that sold discounted luxury goods, for example,” said Underhill. “Now there are more than 200.”

It remains to be seen whether traditional malls can regain their footing, but e-commerce, and the desire to live, work and shop all in the same close vicinity, seem likely to define retail in the decade to come.

Sheryl Sandberg Makes First Public Comment Since Husband's Death

On Tuesday, Sheryl Sandberg made her first public statement since her husband, Dave Goldberg, died suddenly while exercising on vacation in Mexico four days ago.

Hours after President Barack Obama wrote a stirring tribute on the White House’s official Facebook page, Sandberg responded to the post.

"Thank you President Barack Obama for this beautiful tribute -- and for your friendship to our family," she wrote. "Dave Goldberg admired you for your leadership, passion, and your deep love of sports."

Later that evening, Sandberg also shared a personal eulogy about her late husband in a Facebook post of her own, and thanked family and friends for their support.

"I met Dave nearly 20 years ago when I first moved to LA. He became my best friend," she wrote. "He showed me the internet for the first time, planned fun outings, took me to temple for the Jewish holidays, introduced me to much cooler music than I had ever heard."

She recalled their 11 years together as "the deepest love, happiest marriage, and truest partnership," ultimately rewarding with the birth of their two children. "He gave me the experience of being deeply understood, truly supported and completely and utterly loved – and I will carry that with me always," she wrote.

Read her full statement:

I want to thank all of our friends and family for the outpouring of love over the past few days. It has been...

Posted by Sheryl Sandberg on Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, also changed the cover photo of her Facebook page to a picture of her and her husband, who served as the chief executive of SurveyMonkey before his death.

Goldberg died Friday of a head injury after he was found on the floor of a gym at near the Mexican coastal town of Puerto Vallarta. He was rushed to a hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.

UPDATE: This post has been updated to include Sandberg's latest statement.

Corinthian Colleges Files For Bankruptcy

Corinthian Colleges Inc. filed for bankruptcy on Monday, capping a year in which one of the nation's largest for-profit career school chains slowly collapsed under the watch of the U.S. Department of Education amid allegations that it had systematically deceived students with false graduation and job placement rates.

The company's collapse comes a week after it shut down its remaining 30 locations, leaving 16,000 students scrambling for options. At its peak, the company operated more than 120 colleges with more than 110,000 students across North America under the Everest, Wyotech and Heald brands, and investors valued the company at more than $1.4 billion.

Corinthian listed $19.2 million in assets and $143.1 million in debts in its Chapter 11 petition, filed Monday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware. Students at Corinthian's schools have received about $4 billion in federal student loans and $2 billion in federal grants since the start of the 2010-2011 academic year, according to Education Department data. Most of that money flowed to the school in the form of tuition and fees.

Corinthian fell out of favor with the Department of Education last summer over a paperwork dispute, leading to a cash crunch at the company after the department slowed its access to federal financial aid. The Education Department subsequently bailed out the company and brokered a sale of more than half of Corinthian's campuses to ECMC Group, one of the department's contracted debt collectors, in an effort to avoid a collapse that could have forced the department to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in federal student loans given to Corinthian's students.

Meanwhile, the department watched from the sidelines as the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued the company for allegedly duping students with fake job placement promises. The department also shunned pleas by Senate Democrats and state prosecutors to forgive Corinthian students' federal student loans on the grounds that they were misled into enrolling in its schools.

As the company descended into insolvency, the Education Department allowed it to continue to enroll new students at its remaining campuses in an effort to keep its schools attractive to potential buyers. The Education Department's hand-picked monitor, Patrick Fitzgerald of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, had been keeping tabs on the company as part of its agreement with the department.

Federal and state authorities have accused Corinthian of lying about its graduation and job placement rates, misleading potential students into enrolling and stumping up tens of thousands of dollars to obtain allegedly questionable credentials. State prosecutors in Massachusetts, California and Wisconsin have separately sued the company, as has the federal consumer bureau. California settled similar accusations with the company in 2007.

"For too many students, Corinthian turned the American dream of higher ed into a nightmare of debt & despair," Rohit Chopra, the federal consumer bureau's top student loan official, said April 26 on Twitter.

On April 14, the Education Department piled on, accusing Corinthian's Heald schools of misleading students and accreditation agencies about its graduates’ employment rates. The department said it found 947 false job placement rates dating back to at least 2010, and alleged that Corinthian had shown a “blatant disregard” for the federal student loan program.

The Education Department levied a $30 million fine against the company that hasn't yet been paid. In light of Monday's bankruptcy filing, it's unclear whether the department will ever collect the fine or recoup any taxpayer funds from Corinthian.

Corinthian has denied wrongdoing. When it announced on April 26 that it would immediately shut down its remaining campuses, the company blamed federal and state regulators for its abrupt closure.

Students enrolled in Corinthian’s programs but who are unable to complete their studies as a result of the company’s shutdown are eligible to have their federal student loans canceled if they choose not to transfer any of their Corinthian credits to a new school. There are few transfer agreements in place between Corinthian’s schools and traditional public or nonprofit colleges. The Education Department told Corinthian students to consider more than a dozen for-profit schools whose owners are under state or federal investigation, a move that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) promptly criticized last week.

The school's sudden collapse is exactly what the Education Department has been trying to avoid since last summer. Education Secretary Arne Duncan's handling of Corinthian has given rise to a growing movement of so-called "debt strikers" who are refusing to repay the federal student loans they took out to attend Corinthian's schools.

Known as the "Corinthian 100," more than 100 Americans are publicly refusing to make monthly payments on debt they view as illegitimate in light of Corinthian's allegedly false statements and the Education Department's alleged failure to properly police the company's schools and protect students. They want the department to discharge all federal student loans held by current and former Corinthian students.

The Education Department could pass on much of the cost to Corinthian, but with the company claiming its debts exceed its assets by nearly $124 million, it’s unlikely the department would be able to recoup those losses.

Dorie Nolt, an Education Department spokeswoman, said the department would attempt to secure from Corinthian "as much of the $30 million as possible." She declined to answer further questions or make any department officials available for an interview.

The debt strikers were to meet with senior Education Department officials on Monday, but canceled their meeting after news reports indicated that the department had already ruled out the group's central demand.

"We refuse to be the pawns of a department that seeks to use the students’ campaign to give cover to their ongoing failures," the group said in a statement.

The Education Department's failure to police the company ultimately played a role in its demise.

In January 2014, about three months after the state of California sued Corinthian for allegedly misleading students about their future employment opportunities, Education Department officials sent Corinthian a letter requesting information about its reported job placement rates. At the time, the company was facing pressure from a growing group of state and federal authorities that wanted to probe Corinthian’s practices.

A few months later, in May 2014, Corinthian hired Barclays, the giant British bank, to explore a potential sale of its schools, according to a court filing by William Nolan, the company’s chief restructuring officer and a senior managing director at FTI Consulting.

The next month, the Education Department sent another letter to the company, this time claiming that the answers to its January letter were insufficient. The department forced the company to wait 21 days before it could access federal financial aid.

Nearly 90 percent of Corinthian's revenues came from taxpayer cash, Nolan said in the court filing, and the delay in accessing the funds came during the final month of the company’s fiscal year. The cash squeeze threatened the company’s survival, leading Corinthian to strike a deal with the Education Department in which the company would get immediate access to cash in exchange for eventually winding down its operations through sales and orderly shutdowns.

In November, the Education Department helped ECMC Group buy more than 50 campuses from Corinthian to be part of a new unit called Zenith Education Group. The sale was finalized in February of this year. ECMC and Zenith got access to about 40,000 students, or more than half of Corinthian’s 74,000 students as of March 31 of last year, according to Nolan.

Corinthian continued its efforts to sell its remaining campuses through Barclays and another consultant, Eduvize. Nolan said in the document that “several” potential buyers looked at the company, and Corinthian entered into negotiations with at least three of them for its Heald schools. Heald, which was founded more than 150 years ago and enrolled students in health care, business, technology and legal programs, was considered one of Corinthian’s most valuable assets.

But demands by federal and state authorities effectively blocked Corinthian’s sale of Heald, Nolan said. The Education Department wanted Heald’s future owners to reduce tuition by 20 percent and the department wanted $30 million for itself, up to $12 million of which it wanted immediately, Nolan said.

In April, the department fined Heald some $30 million for allegedly misrepresenting its job placement rates.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, California’s top prosecutor, wouldn’t readily allow future buyers to dodge existing claims her office has against Corinthian. Heald buyers likely wanted the company’s assets but none of its legal liabilities.

The last remaining potential buyer for Heald formally withdrew from the sale process on April 22, Nolan said. Corinthian tried to strike agreements with other parties to allow current students to complete their studies, but the Education Department effectively blocked those efforts, too.

The department also wanted Corinthian to post by May 17 what Nolan described as a “significant” letter of credit in order to maintain access to federal financial aid for its students.

“Corinthian’s bankruptcy filing follows aggressive enforcement actions taken by the department to protect students,” Denise Horn, an Education Department spokeswoman, said in a prepared statement. “The department remains committed to protecting students and ensuring that those who have been hurt by fraud -- including at Corinthian -- receive the debt relief they are entitled to.”

Nolan said the company began to wind down its operations on April 23. It announced on April 26 that it would close its remaining campuses, effective April 27. Some 2,700 Corinthian employees lost their jobs.

This story was updated Monday afternoon with information from Corinthian's bankruptcy documents and with a statement from the Education Department.

SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg Died From Head Injury At Gym

By Gabriel Stargardter and Sarah McBride

MEXICO CITY/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - SurveyMonkey Chief Executive Dave Goldberg died Friday from a head injury while exercising at a resort in Mexico, the local prosecutor's office said Monday. Goldberg, the husband of Facebook Inc <FB.O> Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, fell off a treadmill at a private villa in Punta Mita and hit his head, the prosecutor's spokesman said.

Goldberg's brother found him on the floor of the villa gym showing signs of life, the spokesman said. Goldberg was taken to the hospital, where he later died.

The spokesman said that Sandberg was on vacation with Goldberg and went to the hospital. Facebook declined to comment on behalf of Sandberg.

No criminal investigation is planned as there were no signs of violence, the spokesman said.

He said the accident happened at the Palmasola at the Four Seasons Resort, a private 9-bedroom beach front villa, which gives guests access to the facilities of the Four Seasons. Punta Mita is located near the Mexican west coast vacation town of Puerto Vallarta.

Goldberg's brother announced his death on Saturday morning via a Facebook post, and SurveyMonkey also put out a short statement.

One of Silicon Valley's most admired entrepreneurs, Goldberg was known for his low-key demeanor and the grace and good humor with which he handled being married to one of the nation's most recognizable executives.

Under his leadership, privately held poll-taking company SurveyMonkey grew into a $2 billion business.

A memorial service for Goldberg will be held on Tuesday at Stanford University, according to friends of the family.

(Additional reporting by Simon Gardner and Michelle Conlin; Editing by Peter Henderson, Richard Chang, Bernard Orr)

Tesla's New Home Battery Could Be The iPad Of Energy Storage

Tesla Motors just released the iPad of energy storage.

The electric automaker on Thursday unveiled a line of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries -- the sort used in the electric automaker’s Model S sedans -- meant to store solar energy and power homes and businesses. The sleek, wall-mounted devices collect excess energy from solar panels throughout the day for use at night.

The batteries, due out this summer, come in two variations. The commercial-scale Powerpack, currently getting a test run at 10 retail stores across the U.S., can be used by businesses. The consumer model, the Powerwall, will sell for up to $3,500 and could rev the nascent energy-storage industry’s engine.

“It’s the iPad of stationary storage,” Jay Whitacre, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the chief technology officer at the sodium-ion battery company Aquion Energy, told The Huffington Post. “Tablets were out there and no one really wanted them. Then came the iPad.”

As with Apple’s iconic tablet, Tesla -- armed with CEO Elon Musk’s starpower -- could make solar-storage batteries fashionable. Though the company already has a considerable field of rivals, including tech goliath Samsung and Swiss battery startup Alevo, which raised $1 billion in private funding last year, none have generated the same amount of attention as Musk. On stage at a Tesla facility outside Los Angeles on Thursday, the product launch was akin to a new iPhone announcement.

But the real challenge will be to make owning the home device economical.

The first problem is the cost. At $3,500 each, the batteries are expensive. And since each one is limited to storing 10 kilowatt-hours of electricity, many homeowners would need to buy several in order to power their homes fully. Tesla is building a $5 billion plant in Nevada, dubbed the Gigafactory, which will produce lithium-ion batteries en masse. But, until then, the price will remain high. To boot, homeowners would have to bear the cost of installing solar panels or wind turbines to charge the batteries in the first place.

The other issue is the current electricity rate structure in the United States. Here, electricity is more expensive during the day, when solar panels generate energy, and cheaper at night. Utility companies will buy consumers' excess solar generated during peak hours and recirculate it into the power grid, then sell it back at a cheaper night rate, when solar panels aren’t producing energy.

Therefore, there's little incentive for people to use solar-storage batteries that hang onto energy during the day if they could be selling it at peak prices to the utility companies and buying it back later on the cheap.

“It only makes sense for storage if it’s more expensive to buy electricity at night and sell it back during the day,” Brian Warshay, an analyst for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told HuffPost. “But most people aren’t on those types of rates.”

Germany, on the other hand, does offer those rates. The country encourages the use of solar storage by charging high rates for electricity drawn from the power grid in the evenings.

Some states have pioneered models similar to Germany’s. Hawaii has the highest electricity rates in the country, at over 30 cents per kilowatt-hour. Rates in New England are also high, topping more than 20 cents per kilowatt-hour.

But, across the U.S., the average price of electricity was about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour in February, the most recent month calculated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“For the most part,” Warshay said, “grid electricity is just really cheap.”

At the moment, then, Tesla's new batteries stand as something of a proof of concept. But if the company can decrease its manufacturing costs, and if states start pricing electricity more aggressively, Musk's vision of a solar-powered future could become a reality.

For New Lands' End CEO, Green Is The Best Color

Federica Marchionni felt like a natural fit at Lands’ End. Literally.

The 43-year-old chief executive, who took office in February, said was charmed by the apparel company’s outdoorsy brand. Paying homage to the late Lands’ End founder, Gary Comer, an environmentalist and sailor, Marchionni kicked off her reign by doubling down on the company’s efforts to be green.

“He was a sailor, and I love sailing,” she told The Huffington Post in an interview. “It’s the contact with nature that’s important.”

Lands’ End already has an eco-friendly reputation. Marchionni said it recycles 90 percent of the waste it generates at its plant in Wisconsin, where the company is based. Though the carbon footprint from shipping 16 million boxes around the world is notable, she pointed out that 60 percent of the packaging material is recycled. Over the last three years, Lands’ End has also helped plant more than 500,000 trees in U.S. forests.

But Marchionni wants to up the ante. As she mulls expanding around the world, she's also launched a new environmental campaign that would see the company planting more trees, using more sustainable materials in its products and further reducing its carbon footprint.

This spring, Lands' End plans to help plant half a million additional trees in partnership with the National Forest Foundation.

The company is also on track to receive a form certification from the Swiss company Bluesign, which ensures that textiles are made with eco-friendly dyes and materials that are safe for workers to handle. It's unclear how quickly these changes will be implemented.

“Everything that’s going into production is more sustainable,” Marchionni said. “[Bluesign] reduces the harmful chemicals and dyes. They improve safety for the workers at the plant and in local communities.”

Still, Marchionni said she can make the strongest sustainability push for Lands’ End by using the c-suite as a pulpit to reach customers.

In April, she began sending emails to customers to determine who would prefer to receive a digital version of the Lands' End annual catalog. Gradually switching to digital would allow the company to reduce the energy and materials needed to print and ship a physical booklet.

Now, like a couple embarking on honeymoon travel after renewing vows, Marchionni wants to take Lands’ End -- and its recommitment to sustainability -- global. A former executive at Dolce & Gabbana, she envisions a lifestyle brand for outdoorsy people around the planet. Lands’ End currently focuses on the U.S. and has small markets in the U.K., Germany and Japan, but Marchionni wants to be in every major market.

This may be a critical time for the company. Since Marchionni took over in February, the stock price has been on a downward slope.

The company's sales from November 2014 through the end of January 2015 hit $504.6 million, down 4.9 percent from the previous year. Still, its revenues have been rising steadily since it spun off from Sears Holdings Corp. last April.

“I do believe we needed to say what we really are great at,” she said of the new environmental campaign, which kicked off on Earth Day, April 22. “Now we’re going to take on the rest of the world.”

At the very least, Marchionni, who hails from a small village outside Rome, wants to help create a better world for her 7-year-old son, Gabriel.

"He loves the environment, we care about it together," she said. "And I love him. He's my life."