Travel Industry News - Features

As you fly off to your favourite holiday spot this summer, consider the following cost comparisons on the price of airline tickets. Let’s start with Europe. Imagine you book return flights between five pairs of cities: London-Edinburgh, Paris-Toulon, Milan-Rome, Dusseldorf-Munich, and Barcelona-Madrid.

The current multi-channel, multi-screen, 'always on' world is giving rise to a new form of storytelling, dubbed 'transmedia,' that unfolds a narrative across multiple media channels, including television, movies, comic books, video games and Twitter feeds. Look at how the worlds of Stars Wars and Indiana Jones have expanded beyond the original movies, says Andrea Phillips, who got hooked on transmedia in 2001 when she encountered a mysterious website railing against sentient robots. Phillips, now a full-time transmedia author, talked about the phenomenon, its allure and what it means for the future of marketing during a recent interview with Knowledge@Wharton.

Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli's most recent book -- Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It -- has inspired a reaction from just about every group with a stake in today's workforce: employers, employees, recruiters, academics and media commentators. Cappelli debunks the oft-repeated argument from employers that applicants don't have the skills needed for today's jobs. Instead, he puts much of the blame on companies themselves -- including their lack of information about hiring and training costs -- and on computerized applicant tracking systems that can make it harder, not easier, to find qualified job candidates.

In 1970, the economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman published an article in The New York Times Magazine titled, 'The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.' In the article, he referred to corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs as 'hypocritical window-dressing,' and said that businesspeople inclined toward such programs 'reveal a suicidal impulse.' Even four decades ago, at a time of growing public concern for the environment, his views represented the general skepticism and contempt with which many in Corporate America viewed CSR.