Articles

TASA ID: 22108

Google recently announced its new post-pandemic hybrid work policy, requiring employees work in the office for at least three days a week. That policy goes against the desires of many rank-and-file Google employees. A survey of over 1,000 Google employees showed that two-thirds feel unhappy with being forced to be in the office three days a week, with many threatening to leave in internal meetings and public letters, and some already quitting to go to other companies with more flexible options.

Yet Google’s leadership is defending its requirement of mostly in-office work as necessary to protect the company’s social capital, meaning people’s connections to and trust in each other. In fact, according to the former head of HR at Google Laszlo Brock, three days a week is just a transition period. Google’s leadership intends to enforce full-time, in-office work in the next couple of years. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt supports this notion, saying that it’s “important that these people be at the office” to get the benefit of on-the-job training for junior team members.

TASA ID: 15395

In the early beginnings of compliance plans for healthcare businesses, big and small, there was a strong suggestion that all healthcare businesses, practices, hospitals and the like adopt a compliance program but there was no directive as to ensuring that the plan actually worked or was comprehensive enough to ensure the mitigation of potential issues, False Claims Act matters, kickbacks, and the like.   The important part of this in approximately 1998 was to have a plan in place, put it on a shelf and if anyone asked to review it, most practices that did implement a plan would pull it off that shelf, dust it off and provide it to the requester. 

TASA ID: 13992

There has been a lot of press articles on the Archegos blow-up already, but many important questions have still not been asked.

The Factual Background

Archegos Capital Management is a family office, which manages the money of Sung Kook "Bill" Hwang since 2013. Hwang is a "Tiger Cub", a former PM/Analyst from famous Tiger Management. Hwang was managing $500m of his own money, which he earned through his role as a portfolio manager in the previous decade.

Hwang started as a stock Salesman in early 90's at Hyundai Securities. After a legal battle which started in 2009, Hwang and his firm Tiger Asia Management pleaded guilty in 2012 to insider trading & stock manipulation charges. They settled $44m with the SEC and HKD 45m with the HK Securities and Futures Commission.

Archegos is actually the new name of his old company Tiger Asia Management. The firm is based in New York, since Hwang was banned from trading in Hong-Kong in 2014, as well as other Asian markets in which he specialized.

Archegos held large concentrated bets in a few companies, notably ViacomCBS, Discovery, Baidu, Tencent and Vipshop.

Besides his own stock positions (already large), he also held stocks synthetically through swaps at prime brokers.

The primes didn't know of the extent of his other prime relations and how large the positions were. The overall position was not $10bn, but more than $50bn - rumored to reach $100 bn.

The list of affected primes is increasing. Only JP and Deutsche seem to have escaped that wreckage. JP, because they refused to offer services to Archegos, and Deutsche, because they were quick to offload positions.

TASA ID: 18518

Looking back at 2020, there were a lot of unknowns that businesses had to deal with. Those issues impacted both the daily and strategic decision-making of corporate leadership teams and boards. Meanwhile, we also saw massive cost cutting, as well as innovation and increases in productivity (from employees working remotely); with all those adjustments driving profit stability and even growth in many industries. As we move further into 2021, the remote workforce will continue to be a hot topic. It will involve intense debate on all sides as contractors, employers and businesses seek to come back together in a way that is acceptable to everyone, as well as provide a balance between productivity and in-person collaboration. Using a0dvisors and their networks can be, and is, a valuable resource to drive both internal and external strategic relationships and sales channels. 

TASA ID: 12689

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we offer our third article for this journal on handling emergency situations involving mass exposure contaminates [1][2]. One of us (Scaglione) has also authored a book speaking to proactive event prevention and effective resolution [3]. In the pages that follow, we provide an Emergency Preparedness Readiness Checklist that can serve as a roadmap for security executives to follow for more effective disaster management, and we expand on the checklist. We offer guidance on protecting hospital staff, patients, and visitors from becoming contaminated, and we address risk assessment engineering and design, proactive risk exposure mitigation, and innovative recovery strategies for moving forward once emergencies
have passed.