Time for another edition of news you shouldn't miss. Here's what piqued my interest this week:

 

1. Want to get more juice out of your associates? Get the parents involved! Companies are enlisting their employees' parents to help them develop and retain talent. Some businesses are rolling out "Bring Your Parents to Work" days. It turns out that those finicky Millennials—those born in the 1980s through early 2000—are very (overly) attached to their parents; some even like to bring their parents to job interviews.

"It's become best practice [to get parental involvement]," said Michael Van Grinsven, Northwestern Mutual's development director, to The Wall Street Journal. Some of the company's managers "call or send notes to parents when interns achieve their sales goals and let parents come along to interviews and hear details of job offers." (WSJ)

Big Law: Are you listening?

2. It's true: Protestants need to work more. When it comes to being unemployed, "the psychic harm . . . is about 40 percent worse for Protestants than for the general population," finds researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.  (Harvard Business Review blog)

3. Men take more risks when faced with an attractive female opponent. At least in the game of chess. Research from Stockholm University finds that male chess players take riskier moves when they face an attractive female opponent.(Remember that steamy scene where Faye Dunaway, left, played chess against Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair? Does anyone remember who won?)  

Unfortunately, the risk didn't pay off for the male players' performance. Women, however, weren't affected by the attractiveness of their opponent.    (Harvard Business Review blog)

4. Ferrari loves lawyers who love their clients. Remember that Canadian lawyer who abandoned his spiffy Ferrari in the floodwaters in order to make a court date? The Ferrari was totally ruined, but the lawyer Howard Levitt got kudos for his devotion to the client.

Guess who else was impressed? Ferrari. The luxe car maker offered Levitt a super generous discount on a new model that usually sells for around $300,000. As Staci Zaretsky sums it up in Above the Law:

Ferrari apparently offers “decent human being” discounts. This is actually a great lesson for all of the lawyers out there: if you (and your car) have to go through sh*t for one of your clients, keep going, because you might be handsomely rewarded for it."

How sweet. (Above the Law)

5. J.D. Salinger was a jerk and a creep. It breaks my heart to say this because I loved, loved Catcher in the Rye, but Salinger was no Holden Caulfied. Read Joyce Maynard's excellent article, "Was Salinger Too Pure for this World?" (The New York Times)

 

Do you have topics you'd like to discuss or tips to share? Email chief blogger Vivia Chen at [email protected] 

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