Black People In Business – World Wide

By LESLIE KWOH

Unless Goldman Sachs

executive Greg Smith is shopping a book proposal, the scathing opinion piece he wrote announcing his resignation in Wednesday’s New York Times is a lesson in how not to quit, career experts say.

The piece, titled “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” accused the banking behemoth of fostering a toxic culture where profits come before client interests. In the piece, Mr. Smith criticized senior management and aspiring leaders for hewing primarily to the goal of making money.

The right way to quit is to “just resign and move on, and keep it quiet,” says Laura Hill, president of Careers in Motion LLC, a career-coaching firm in New York City.

Mr. Smith may have sought sympathy or catharsis, but airing grievances about superiors in a letter, whether private or public, is unlikely to amount to much, she adds. “It’s not going to change the organization,” she says.

Still, Mr. Smith’s piece dominated chatter among Wall Street workers on Wednesday and set off a social-media firestorm. Online commenters’ views ran the gamut of emotion, from disgust to wistful admiration for Mr. Smith. On one point, however, nearly all agreed: Mr. Smith is unlikely to find work in finance.

Ms. Hill concurs: “What he did generally renders you unemployable in your industry” and makes him unlikely to be seen as trustworthy by many other firms.

Mr. Smith didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment Wednesday.

However harmful Mr. Smith’s letter may be for his future prospects, crisis-management experts say the episode should spur Goldman to think deeply about how and why one employee’s discontent could fester and spill over so publicly.

Employees generally become disgruntled when they feel like they aren’t being heard by management, says Davia Temin, chief executive of Temin and Company, a New York crisis- and reputation-management firm. Frustrations can grow when employees escalate concerns to higher and higher levels and still feel ignored.

While Ms. Temin says she doesn’t have firsthand knowledge of the situation within Goldman, she notes that it’s possible that writing an op-ed may have been a last resort for Mr. Smith. “If he felt like he was being heard, it probably would not have gotten to this point,” she says.

In a statement, Goldman rebutted Mr. Smith’s account of the company’s culture. “We disagree with the views expressed, which we don’t think reflect the way we run our business,” a spokeswoman wrote. “In our view, we will only be successful if our clients are successful. This fundamental truth lies at the heart of how we conduct ourselves.”

Ms. Hill of Careers in Motion notes that while it may be difficult to lead cultural change at a company as large as Goldman, disgruntled employees should handle their frustrations by first “setting an example” for their colleagues. If they’re still dissatisfied with the response, then it may be time to leave the company—gracefully. That includes refraining from bashing an employer in later job interviews.

Someone in Mr. Smith’s position, for example, might describe their previous employer in more diplomatic terms, she says: “Over time, I felt their commitment to customers was not as strong.”

By JULIE V. IOVINE

Jeff Goldberg/Esto for Ennead Architects

The Natural History Museum of Utah, perched on the foothills of the Rockies.

Salt Lake City

There’s nothing like a natural-history museum to give one a little perspective. Compared with the more than 160 million years that dinosaurs stomped the earth, mankind’s roughly 20,000-year history is barely a sliver of time. In the past, the grandiose subject of where we came from and what we are made of called for appropriately solemn and magisterial architecture: sweeping stairs, baronial halls, relentless symmetries and axial certainty. In other words, something in the Beaux Arts style.

The Natural History Museum of Utah, at its 200,000-square-foot home on the campus of the University of Utah here, has gone for a different feeling—that of a trailhead. Instead of ascending a grand staircase, you enter as through the faceted, sheer walls of a canyon, rendered in beige plaster and board-formed concrete. Instead of a procession of galleries with symmetrical predictability, the organizational logic is that of switchback paths traversing ramps, bridges and underpasses.

Designed by the New York-based Ennead Architects, with exhibition design by the ubiquitous Ralph Appelbaum Associates, and in collaboration with GSBS Architects, the museum makes an assertive break with formality. It plays up today’s educational mantra of experience, discovery and interconnectedness over yesteryear’s emphasis on order, direction and significance.

If the interior is conspicuously nontraditional, the exterior of the $102.5 million building, which opened in November, seems barely there at all. In a controversial move, it isn’t located near such other downtown cultural venues as the Church History Museum and the Leonardo, the new science, technology and art museum. Instead it straddles a popular hiking trail perched halfway up the slopes of the Wasatch Range, foothills to the Rockies at the edge of both the campus and the town. Had it not been for the spring panoply of bright green grasses visible on a recent visit, the museum, clad in a burnished copper mottled by streaks of zinc and tin, might have disappeared completely amid the reddish-brown rock against which it is set.

According to Todd Schliemann, a partner of Ennead Architects, camouflage was much to the point in the interest of spreading the natural-history message. To that end—unusual for climate-control-conscious museums—multiple terraces open directly off exhibits. Thus, in one display you can observe a model of Lake Bonneville, which filled the Great Basin during the Pleistocene era some 15,000 years ago before it drained out through Red Rock Pass, leaving nothing but the puddle that is Salt Lake (energetic crankers can even spin a big spigot to fill the display with water and pull the plug on it themselves); then you can step out onto the adjacent terrace to view the actual lake in the distance and check the current level, which apparently varies slightly all the time.

Reminders of the natural world just beyond the walls abound, introducing a redeeming note of seriousness and wonder to the blatant infotainment of the exhibits inside, an Appelbaum trademark. The main lobby is called “The Canyon.” It’s the kind of sappy naming game that many institutions go for today. But it works, partly because the focal point of the space is an enormous panoramic window that, with breathtaking sweep, delivers natural history live: a view of the entire Salt Lake Valley and snow-capped Oquirrh Mountains. The lobby space is open and expansive, with café tables and cherry-wood benches meant to suggest fallen logs. There’s also a 40-foot-tall display wall that serves as a kind of amuse-bouche of collection highlights. It includes dinosaur fossils, conch shells, iridescent butterflies, ancient moccasins and woven baskets. The laudable intention was to provide a public place where people can range widely and even see a little something for free before buying a ticket. Two bridges cross overhead and a third seemingly carved from rock scales the back wall to underscore the adventure theme.

The NHMU may not go in for the old-fashioned coherence of symmetry, but it is organized in a left brain, right brain sort of way, with experiential galleries to the right of the Canyon and active research labs, special exhibits, vitrines for exotic rocks, and artifact storage (viewable through glass doors) to the left. But with wilding toddlers to wrangle (Utah has one of the nation’s youngest populations), odds are that it will be to the state-of-the-art interactive right side of the museum that people will head first for a full day of exploration.

You only have to see Allie, the Allosaurus, to realize just how far pedagogical entertainment in the natural sciences has come. This rubbery, stubby-armed flesh-eater was a favorite at the old natural-history museum. Slide a quarter down its craw and it would sing “Do-Re-Mi.” Now Allie has been relegated to an out-of-the-way spot by some elevators on the lowest entry level and supplanted by far more sophisticated educational tools. These include five learning labs for school groups and a showcase lab where working scientists pursue their research and bone dusting in full sight of visitors, a reality-show-era diorama.

Keyboards, screens, Post-it notes and good old chalk-and-blackboard beckon for interaction at every possible level. There are rubber bones to fit into the puzzle of a fossil imprint and fake pottery shards to arrange into an ancient painted vase just as archaeologists might. Cleverly, the museum shows off its exceedingly rare collection of competing types of horned triceratops, arranging them just the way local hunters might display their own bagged prey, as heads mounted on the wall.

The Beaux Arts museum of yore presented artifacts—whether rocks, fossils or human tools—in a fashion that made them seem to belong to a more primitive, less complicated time. Today’s approach generally makes past and present, nature and human all part of one ingeniously complex continuum. In its new digs, the NHMU captures that spirit at its most awe-inspiring.

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared May 9, 2012, on page D6 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Natural History, Modern Setting.

More Paid to Shield Directors, Officers

Companies are paying up to protect their leaders from potential lawsuits, a new report shows.

About a quarter of public firms raised the limits in their directors’ and officers’ liability insurance policies last year, while one in seven private or nonprofit companies did the same, according to the results of a poll expected to be released Wednesday by Towers Watson, a risk-management consulting company.

Together, the 400 companies surveyed reported an average policy limit of $87 million, up from $80 million in 2010.

The unusually large increase reflects deepening concern over the exposures that company leaders face in “a highly litigious environment,” says Larry Racioppo, leader of the executive liability practice at Towers Watson. The policies, generally called “D&O liability insurance,” shield board members and executives from personal losses when regulators, shareholders, employees or clients sue a company.

Experts say that such policies have gotten more attention thanks to lawsuits that forced directors at both Enron Corp. WorldCom Inc. to pay millions out of pocket, because their firms’ liability insurance didn’t cover the cost of the legal settlements.

Respondents cited regulatory claims as their top concern, Mr. Racioppo says—a change from a few years ago, when firms tended to worry more about securities class-action suits.

Most companies haven’t yet put their policies to the test, the study suggests: Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they haven’t faced any claims against their D&O insurance policies in the last decade.

—Leslie Kwoh

Take a Deep Breath, Make Ethical Choices

A recent study suggests it may only take a few minutes to help prevent corporate scandals.

The study, from researchers at Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins University, INSEAD and City University of Hong Kong, found that when workers face a choice between right and wrong, they are about five times more likely to make the unethical choice when the decision is rushed. By contrast, pausing to consider the matter makes them more likely to do right.

Researchers conducted several experiments with 146 college undergraduates. One test put students in a fictitious situation in which they received more money for lying, less for being truthful. The test examined how participants fared under both speedy and contemplative conditions—less than 30 seconds versus three minutes. Those who had time to think were much more likely to make the moral choice, and be truthful.

In another experiment, students facing a moral choice received an anonymous email urging them to either act morally, act in their own self interest or offering no advice at all. The researchers found that subjects were four times more likely to make moral decisions when they received emails urging them to do so.

The study, published in the current edition of the Academy of Management Journal, urges workers facing moral decisions to “take the time to think or to consult an ethical colleague.”

While pausing to ponder a moral choice might not prevent large-scale fraud a la Bernard Madoff, it could make a “considerable difference in innumerable instances of lying and fraud that happen every day in the business world,” says study co-author J. Keith Murnighan, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.

—Rachel Emma Silverman

Young Job Seekers Turn to Smartphones

Companies seeking youthful job candidates should go where young people can usually be found: On their smartphones.

That is the conclusion of a survey of 3,500 U.S. college students, graduate students and recent graduates conducted by Potentialpark Communications, a Stockholm-based market research firm.

Though most company career sites remain desktop and laptop-bound, 80% of survey respondents said that they either currently use smartphones for job hunting or see themselves doing so in the future.

Some companies are already onto the trend. AT&T Inc.

has offered mobile tools for job-seekers since 2009. When users click on the company’s careers site from their smartphones, it identifies their device and directs them to a page designed for that phone. The company uses location-aware technology to return the job listings nearest to the user, said Jennifer Terry, director of staffing strategic initiatives.General Electric Co.

is in the process of developing a GE Careers iPad app that will be available later this year, said Michael Tresca, who leads the company’s online recruiting efforts.

That percentage is proof that companies who fail to embrace mobile job-search tools could wind up alienating young people, says Björn Wigeman of Potentialpark.

Meanwhile, Potentialpark conducted an analysis of 117 American companies’ online recruiting efforts and found that roughly a quarter of those companies had either mobile career apps or a mobile-enabled website with job listings.

—Joseph Walker

News & Trends

A version of this article appeared March 7, 2012, on page B9 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: News & Trends.