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Misers everywhere: that Mediterranean cruise could be within reach at last. There"ll be no free ride to the port, and no free food or entertainment on board. The cabin will measure 30 meters square and housekeeping will be extra. But the fiberglass suite is easy to clean, and costs as little as ￡29 a night. Earlier this year, serial entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the man who gave Europe its first budget airline, cashed in ￡14 million of his easyJet shares to fund what he calls a "little shopping spree." Boldly expanding his no-frills model into new markets, Stelios (he insists on first-name in formality) plans to open the first easyHotel in London this year with prices from ￡ 5 a night, an easy Bus fleet and easy Cruise, ready to sail next summer. Also on the list: easy Pizzas and easy Tele com, a mobile-phone service. Can he make it work The soaring success of easyJet and its rivals was Europe"s great business story of the late 1990s, and yet more carriers are emerging to serve the 10 nations that joined the European Union last week. While copycatting the idea may look like a no-brainer, though, some experts doubt Stelios"s expansion plans have much of a future. "The no-frills model is very fragile." says Chris Voss of London Business School. "Stelios is applying it rather indiscriminately." The entrepreneur"s record is mixed. He launched easyJet in 1995, when he was 28, and it now has 70 planes and revenues of ￡932 million last year, up nearly 70 percent from 2002. But his first attempt to clone the no-frills model, a Europe-wide chain of Internet cafes launched at the height of the bubble, has since struggled to make money. His first easy Cinema-tickets for just 50 pence is suffering because big distributors, fearful of undercutting their other business, refuse to allow cheap screenings of new blockbusters. The larger problem: reducing prices is not enough to make no-frills work. Stelios, for example, likes to sell direct to the customer, preferably online, and avoids corporate accounts on the theory that only individuals care enough about price to be loyal no-kills customers. He chooses only sectors in which the volume of business will clearly rise as prices fall. There"s no point, say, in offering a cut-rate burial service. Says Stelios: "The demand for funerals isn"t going to go up—regardless of the price." What does Stelios mean by talking about funerals
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Improving the balance between the working part of the day and the rest of it is a goal of a growing number of workers in rich Western countries. Some are turning away from the ideals of their parents, for whom work always came first; others with scarce skills are demanding more because they know they can get it. Employers, Caught between a falling population of workers and tight controls on immigration, are eager to identify extra perks that will lure more "talent" their way. Just now they are focusing on benefits (especially flexible working) that offer employees more than just pay. Some companies saw the change of mood some time ago. IBM has more than 50 different programmes promoting work-life balance and Bank of America over 30. But plenty of other firms remain unconvinced and many lack the capacity to cater to such ideas even if they wanted to. Helen Muftis, with Hay Group, a human-resources consultancy, sees a widening gap between firms "at the creative end of employment" and those that are not. The chief component of almost all schemes to promote work-life balance is flexible working. This allows people to escape rigid nine-to-five schedules and work away from a formal office. IBM says that 40% of its employees today work off the company premises. For many businesses, flexible working is a necessity. Globalization has spread the hours in which workers need to communicate with each other and increased the call for flexible shifts. Nella Barkley, an American who advises companies on work-life balance, says that large firms ale beginning to understand the value of such schemes, "but only slowly". For most of them, they still mean little more than child care, health care and flexible working. To some extent, the proliferation of work-life-balance schemes is a function of today"s labour market. Companies in knowledge, based industries worry about the shortage of skills and how they are going to persuade talented people to work for them. Although white-collar workers are more likely to be laid off nowadays, they are also likely to get rehired. Unemployment among college graduates in America is just over 2%. The same competition for scarce. talent is evident in Britain. For some time to come, talented people in the West will demand more from employers, and clever employers will create new gewgaws to entice them to join. Those employers should note that for a growing number of these workers the most appealing gewgaw of all is the freedom to work as and when they please. IBM is mentioned in the third paragraph to show that
Are women really advancing In Africa, HIV/AIDS has set them back, while in India, pregnant women (1)_____ prefer boys they abort half a million females a year. And in Britain, which saw a (2)_____ female prime minister during the 1980s, a report by the nation"s Equal Opportunities Commission says gender equality in public life is "decades away". (3)_____ about 10% of senior positions in large companies and law enforcement are held by women, while the (4)_____ for women in Parliament is so slow that equality may (5)_____ a couple centuries. In Britain, as in America, there"s a (6)_____ that discrimination plays (7)_____ of a role in women"s progress in public life as more women stay in favor of motherhood (8)_____ careers in what"s called "choice feminism". These "choices", however, are often (9)_____.by the high cost of day care or its unavailability. In Japan, (10)_____ discrimination against women still remains strong, (11)_____ a 1985 law against it. But now that nation, with its low birth rate, faces a labor (12)_____ as it ages rapidly, and the government is (13)_____ new measures to encourage mothers to return to work after childbirth. The new measures (14)_____ more work flexibility for such returning workers, (15)_____ day care, and support women entrepreneurs. The Arab world has only recently begun to recognize the untapped potential of women as leaders. Iraq"s new Constitution required every (16)_____ candidate in the recent election to be a woman and that its parliament be 25 percent female. (17)_____ the charter also gives a (18)_____ role to Islam in writing new laws. (19)_____ many measures, from politics to poverty, women still have a long way to go toward equality and (20)_____.
Improving the balance between the working part of the day and the rest of it is a goal of a growing number of workers in rich Western countries. Some are turning away from the ideals of their parents, for whom work always came first; others with scarce skills are demanding more because they know they can get it. Employers, Caught between a falling population of workers and tight controls on immigration, are eager to identify extra perks that will lure more "talent" their way. Just now they are focusing on benefits (especially flexible working) that offer employees more than just pay. Some companies saw the change of mood some time ago. IBM has more than 50 different programmes promoting work-life balance and Bank of America over 30. But plenty of other firms remain unconvinced and many lack the capacity to cater to such ideas even if they wanted to. Helen Muftis, with Hay Group, a human-resources consultancy, sees a widening gap between firms "at the creative end of employment" and those that are not. The chief component of almost all schemes to promote work-life balance is flexible working. This allows people to escape rigid nine-to-five schedules and work away from a formal office. IBM says that 40% of its employees today work off the company premises. For many businesses, flexible working is a necessity. Globalization has spread the hours in which workers need to communicate with each other and increased the call for flexible shifts. Nella Barkley, an American who advises companies on work-life balance, says that large firms ale beginning to understand the value of such schemes, "but only slowly". For most of them, they still mean little more than child care, health care and flexible working. To some extent, the proliferation of work-life-balance schemes is a function of today"s labour market. Companies in knowledge, based industries worry about the shortage of skills and how they are going to persuade talented people to work for them. Although white-collar workers are more likely to be laid off nowadays, they are also likely to get rehired. Unemployment among college graduates in America is just over 2%. The same competition for scarce. talent is evident in Britain. For some time to come, talented people in the West will demand more from employers, and clever employers will create new gewgaws to entice them to join. Those employers should note that for a growing number of these workers the most appealing gewgaw of all is the freedom to work as and when they please. The present situation about the work-life balance problem is that
Scientists Johan Feenstra and Rob Hayes think they"ve figured out how a process called electrowetting can make paper that can do anything a videoscreen does. So far, though, all they"ve got to show for their efforts is a tiny piece of e-paper one centimeter square—only 225 pixels, or picture elements. That won"t be nearly enough for headlines and news videos. The only hint of the technology"s potential is a laptop presentation the inventors have set up. It features Professor Shape, Harry Potter"s teacher, holding an electronic newspaper with an embedded video clip. "That"s what we want," says Hayes. They"re likely to get it. Late last month in Tokyo, Sony took an important leap in this direction by introducing Librie, an e-book reader. Although it"s available only in black and white, Librie has the most important characteristic of paper: it reflects natural light. That means it can be read on sunny days or viewed from any angle. You can even choose your own font size. Is this finally the beginning of the end of paper The answer is closer to "yes" than you may think. The holdup so far has been user-unfriendly screens, but now e-paper no longer relies on back-lit displays. A reflective display is easy on the eyes, with twice the contrast of computer screens and up to six times the brightness. It uses power only when changing the page, so a battery can last 300 hours. Several firms are competing for leader ship. The Philip"s display on Librie uses technology from Massachusetts-based E-Ink Corp. An electric charge moves either black or white capsules to the surface of the page in patterns that form images. Gyricon Media uses rotating balls with one black side and one white side for signs and bill boards. Other companies are focusing on improvements in liquid-crystal displays. The next challenge is to add color. One option for books would be a simple color filter, but that would block two thirds of the light. Guofu Zhou, who runs the E-Ink project for Philips, thinks products with colored ink can be ready for the market within seven years. He"s now focusing on e-paper that can display 16 or more gradations of gray, which would come in handy in medical imaging or to display black-and-white photographs at home. Labs around the world are also racing to design a robust yet flexible backing. Philips researchers are working on a technology for laminating E-Ink on a plastic layer instead of glass, which would then roll into a pen-sized tube. A flexible product for mobile phones and digital cameras can be ready in three to five years. The greatest advance that Librie has is that
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