Still, as striking as some of the details of the settlement are, the scandal shouldn’t have been surprising. For decades, Volkswagen has practiced a management style that imposes rigid goals and punishes middle- and lower-level employees who are unable to keep up with the pace. The origins of this approach, known as top-down control, date back more than a century, to the work of the industrial-efficiency guru Frederick Winslow Taylor. In its current iteration, the concept typically sees executives formulate bold strategic objectives and timelines for new products and services, with little input from others in the company. Although these aims are often presented as guidelines, not mandates, management rarely treats them as negotiable. In turn, rank-and-file employees, pressured by the expectations placed on them, try to deliver at all costs.
Although top-down culture is increasingly being discredited in favor of greater organizational coöperation and worker empowerment, it is still prevalent, embraced to varying degrees by big names like Apple, Nissan, General Electric, and Boeing. In some cases, it has been costly: while reporting a feature on Boeing for Portfolio magazine some years ago, I observed that the company’s difficulties in getting its vaunted Dreamliner off the ground were directly related to the “aggressive goals-fearful employee” dynamic.
.. few other companies apply top-down control so unremittingly, and that this was the likeliest explanation for why its engineers were willing to commit crimes and defraud the public to save their jobs. As one person who had worked closely with Volkswagen told me, the company “is fuelled by intimidation at every level, which creates a borderline, or sometimes over the borderline, unethical culture.”
.. “Everyone in that company was adversarial,” the consultant who worked with Volkswagen told me.
Luck Runs Out for a Leader of ‘Brexit’ Campaign
On Thursday, the anger at Mr. Johnson was palpable, replacing last week’s anger at Prime Minister David Cameron for calling the referendum in the first place. The sense that Mr. Johnson had presided over the Brexit campaign without a plan for what to do if it won — and then walked away without cleaning up his mess — was particularly enraging.
“He’s like a general who marches his army to the sound of guns and the moment he sees the battleground abandons it,” Michael Heseltine, a Tory politician, told the BBC. “I have never seen anything like it. He ripped the Tory party apart. He has created the greatest constitutional crisis in peacetime in my life.”
.. With his air of disarrayed befuddlement, his crazy coiffure, his idiosyncratically imaginative P.G. Wodehousian locution, his habit of slipping into Latin and Greek, his foot-in-the-mouth self-deprecation and his obvious delight in himself, he oozes a charm rarely seen in politicians.
He cycles to work and carries his things in a backpack. He looks as if he’s slept in his clothes and just gotten out of bed. He has the privileged demeanor of an old Etonian (he went to school there), but a Bill Clintonesque way with crowds and an appeal that transcends class.
.. It was a boring assignment, but Mr. Johnson found a way of livening it: He made things up. His great talent was to take tiny grains of information in reports and proposals, repackage them as official European policy and present them as part of a broad narrative about Brussels’s risibility. His stories were full of wrong-sized condoms, fishermen forced to wear hairnets and international disputes over cheese policy.
While his stories became increasingly influential in the euroskeptic wing of the Conservative Party and in many ways set the tone for the British papers’ coverage of Europe ever since, Mr. Johnson tends to treat his approach as great fun.
.. “We had eight frustrating years where we’d ask detailed policy questions, and what we’d get back in response was bluster and grandiose claims,” said Joanne McCartney, a Labour Assembly member who is now deputy mayor. “If he didn’t know the answer to the question, which was a regular occurrence, he’d use bluster and wit to avoid answering.”
.. Mr. Johnson tried his normal humorous approach. Asked, for instance, about his assertion that the European Union has a law saying that balloons cannot be blown up by children under 8 (it doesn’t), he deflected the question, saying, “In my household, only children under 8 are allowed to blow up balloons.”
Donald Trump exaggerated his wealth, analysis finds
A new analysis by Bloomberg challenges Donald Trump’s claim that he is worth more than $10 billion. Based on the company’s standardized method for estimating billionaires’ wealth, Trump is worth only about $2.9 billion, even less than Forbes’s estimate of $4.1 billion.
.. “Trump’s golf and resort properties are valued at a combined $570 million, based on price-to-sales ratios for similar properties,” write Bloomberg’s Caleb Melby and Richard Rubin. “Trump said last month that these holdings are worth $2 billion based on the June 2014 figures, without disclosing his methodology.”
.. Trump values his personal brand at $3.3 billion, an estimate that makes clear he is as much a salesman as an investor.
Boris Johnson, Britain’s Donald Trump, could become prime minister with ‘Brexit’ vote
The verbose, charmingly unkempt Johnson, 52, has been described as Britain’s Donald Trump; he’s stoked anti-immigrant hate and shown little regard for the truth during the “Brexit” campaign.
.. American Erik Bidenkap, who’s working in London, says the similarities between Trump’s presidential campaign in the U.S. and the “Brexit” campaign in the U.K. are stark. “In America, politicians are saying, ‘We’re losing to China, we’re losing to Mexico, they’re stealing our jobs,'” Bidenkap told NPR. “Here in Great Britain, same thing.
.. No one who’s followed Johnson’s career is surprised by his rhetoric. The former journalist has always had a tetchy relationship with the truth.
.. Johnson “has managed to use his disarranged, slightly comical hair as a helmet, shielding him from more serious scrutiny. It lets him come across as an unconventional politician…”