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A Cult Bike From India Takes On the World

NEW DELHI, India — The Royal Enfield Bullet, often described as the oldest continuously produced motorcycle in the world, is a cult product for enthusiasts who love it for its vintage feel as much as for the thrum of its engine.

Muscular and pliant, the Bullet — an Indian-made avatar of an old British brand — has found renewed popularity over the last few years, as leisure motorcycling in India has blossomed. Its manufacturer, Royal Enfield Motors, sold almost 175,000 motorcycles —Bullets as well as three other brands — in 2013.

Royal Enfield’s newest model, a midsize “cafe racer” called the Continental GT, was introduced at an elaborate event in London in September. “It’s the first bike that we’ve developed keeping the world market in mind,” said Siddhartha Lal, who is credited with turning Royal Enfield around.

Mr. Lal, age 40, is the chief executive of Eicher Motors, a manufacturer of buses, trucks and tractors that owns Royal Enfield. Uncommonly for an Indian executive, he sports sideburns and wears jeans and a bomber jacket to meetings. He was riding a Bullet when he was in university, well before Eicher, under his father’s management, bought Royal Enfield in 1993.

The sale price was “just pennies,” Mr. Lal said. Eicher reported revenue of more than $1 billion in 2012.

The Bullet was first produced by a British firm named Royal Enfield, but after that company shut down in 1971, its Indian manufacturing unit – in the city of Madras (now Chennai) – bought the rights to the name and continued to produce the Bullet.

But through the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Lal said, Royal Enfield’s management made a series of bad decisions and buried the company in debt. “The motorcycle was still resilient, though. It was probably selling 1,500 or 2,000 pieces a month,” he said. “Eicher bought Royal Enfield because at its core was the Bullet. That was the appeal.”

Mr. Lal set himself to turn Royal Enfield around in 2000, when he was 27, and the company first sputtered and then roared back to life. Dan Holmes, who fell so in love with a Bullet he saw at a trade show that he opened a Royal Enfield dealership in Goshen, Ind., recalled how the quality of the motorcycles improved from the late 1990s through the 2000s.

“Eicher started investing real money into their bikes,” Mr. Holmes said. The electric start grew more reliable while fuel injections and transmissions were revamped.

The Royal Enfield motorcycle, whose basic profile changed very little over the years, appealed to buyers, he said, because one could tinker endlessly with it. Jay Leno owns one, as does Billy Joel. Mr. Holmes himself owns what he calls “the two most modified Royal Enfields in the world,” which he used to set speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats in 2008.

As one of perhaps seven or eight exclusive Royal Enfield dealers in the United States back in the early 2000s, Mr. Holmes sold his motorcycles for $3,500 to $4,000 each, taking custody of them in dribs and drabs from a national distributor. In 2003, his best year, he sold 35 Royal Enfields.

Exports remain limited, although they are growing, and Mr. Lal is ambitious about scaling up. Last year, Royal Enfield exported 3,500 motorcycles. Six hundred of those went to America, its biggest overseas market.

Back in India, however, Royal Enfield has caught the beginning of a wave in leisure motorcycling. Kumar Kandaswami, a senior director at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India, said a split had emerged in the market, between riders who wanted light motorcycles just to commute and those who wanted the thrill of the machine itself.

“Even at a rough estimate, there are easily half a million buyers out there who want to use motorcycles for leisure,” Mr. Kandaswami said. “There are active motorcycle communities now. Our highways have improved. People have more money to spend.”

The vastness of this market attracted manufacturers like the British Triumph, which opened in India in 2013, and Harley-Davidson, which arrived in 2009.

“Before we came, if there was any passion among motorcyclists at all, it was among Royal Enfield owners,” Anoop Prakash, the managing director of Harley-Davidson India, said. “People underestimated the market, thinking that, at our level, sales would be fewer than 800 bikes a year across the country.” Since July 2010, more than 4,000 Harley-Davidsons have been sold in India.

Japan’s E-Reader Industry Struggles to Keep Up as Amazon Takes the Lead

It was a T-shirt emblazoned with “Beat Amazon.” Mr. Mikitani wanted to signal that the two companies had no intention of slugging it out in a print-versus-digital fight in Japan.

The alliance did little to help them defend against Amazon. Four months later, Amazon brought its Kindle e-reader to Japan. It quickly became Japan’s top-selling e-reader, gaining 38.3 percent of the market, according to the MM Research Institute, a data firm in Tokyo. Even though Rakuten’s Kobo had beaten Kindle to market by nearly five months, it grabbed only 33 percent of Japan’s e-reader sales during the same 12-month period. Sony, which had stated its goal of selling half of all e-readers by 2012, managed to hold only 25.5 percent with its devices.

Amazon sells its Kindle in 14 countries, Japan being the very latest. Misao Konishi, an Amazon spokeswoman, declined to talk about the company’s goals for the Japanese market, but she did offer some insight into Amazon’s ambitions. “Every book ever printed, in every language, available to buy in 60 seconds,” Ms. Konishi said. “There are many things to accomplish in order to achieve that vision in Japan.”

The Kindle’s quick success is a stark contrast to the Japanese companies’ efforts. Until Amazon showed up, e-readers failed to live up to expectations. Sony brought out the first reader using E Ink technology in Japan in 2004, the LIBRIe.

Buyers of the LIBRIe, which like early Kindles showed black text on a white background, suffered from a convoluted marketplace that allowed them only to rent e-books, not buy them. Amazon, which developed its Kindle with digital books people could buy from — where else? — Amazon.com, found instant success after its introduction in the United States in 2007.

Sony stopped selling its device that year. The company’s subsequent e-readers, even after Sony developed a library of books to buy, have met with limited success.

Japan isn’t a big contributor to global e-reader sales, estimated at around 19.9 million units by IDC, a market research firm. MM Research said that a total of 470,000 devices were sold there last year, and that it expected sales to climb about 10 percent to 520,000 units in 2014.

Amazon’s victory over Sony and Rakuten, which got into the e-reader business when it bought the Toronto-based Kobo in November 2011, began with aggressive pricing. Amazon sold the Kindle Paperwhite for 7,980 yen, or about $80. Not only was its price about $40 less than it was in the United States, it also matched that of Rakuten’s Kobo and Sony’s PRS-T2.

In a bid to gain market share, Rakuten dropped the price of its e-reader in July to to 5,480 yen, and will continue to focus on this basic model, even as the company launches the new high-end Kobo Aura HD in Europe and the United States in September.

But Amazon wasn’t winning just because of price. It also gave consumers another reason to prefer the Kindle. “The reason for the Kindle’s success in Japan is the same as it was in America,” said Munechika Nishida, author of “The Truth About the E-book Revolution” and a technology analyst. “The Amazon Web store is the easiest to use, the easiest to understand.”

Sony and Rakuten’s e-readers are not technologically inferior to the Kindle, Mr. Nishida said, but buying e-books on the Kindle marketplace takes fewer steps. Rakuten and Sony’s devices make browsing and purchasing more difficult, he said.

The Japan Kindle store, which opened last October, offers more than 140,000 Japanese-language titles. It added 7,000 more titles in just the last 30 days. Kodansha now has 10,617 e-book titles available on the Kindle marketplace.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 2, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified the features available on three e-reader models used in a price comparison. The Kindle Paperwhite, the basic Kobo e-reader and the Sony PRS-T2 have monochrome screens, not color screens. 

For a Chef, 41 Years in the Kitchen Takes Its Toll

Monica Almeida/The New York TimesFor Mark Peel, 58, the crazy hours and physical strain of life as a professional chef have meant wrist, shoulder and back pain, a bone spur and hernia operations. But he is aiming to age gracefully, with a less strenuous schedule.

STARTING as a dishwasher at the age of 17, the chef Mark Peel worked his way up at some of the great California restaurants: Ma Maison, Michael’s, Chez Panisse, Spago, Chinois and, finally, for more than two decades, Campanile, his own place in Los Angeles.

Mr. Peel, who used to work nonstop at Campanile and Spago, now takes care to stretch. This is his home kitchen.

Those 41 years in the kitchen have brought him considerable fame: Campanile won the James Beard award as outstanding restaurant in the United States in 2001. They have also brought him carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists and thoracic outlet syndrome in his shoulders, resulting from repetitive stirring, fine knife movements and heavy lifting. He has a bone spur on one foot and a cyst between toes of the other from constantly standing. He has had three hernia operations and lives with a chronically sore back.

Being a professional chef, like being an elite athlete, tends to be a young person’s game. When he started out, Mr. Peel thought nothing of shifting a 125-pound stockpot full of hot, sloshing liquid from one burner to the next without calling for help, his arms stretched away from his body, muscles tight to control the motion. It was a recipe for trouble down the line.

The 16-hour days he once put in at Spago — seven days a week for seven weeks in a row — are no longer an option for Mr. Peel, who is now 58. He straightens a sore shoulder at the memory of those days. He can still work like that, he says — “just not as often, and not as long.” Today, he says, he can survive perhaps three days of crazy hours, as long as Day 4 includes sleeping in, to recover.

In September, Mr. Peel will open a new Campanile at Los Angeles International Airport. He closed the 190-seat original last fall after 23 years, 16 of them alongside the chef Nancy Silverton, then his wife, and seven more years on his own. His career track record going into the new project is excellent; his body, the worse for wear.

The new, smaller Campanile will open at the American Airlines terminal, in a licensing agreement with Host International. Mr. Peel will “train, taste, advise, direct and organize,” while younger chefs execute the dishes he creates. “At some point, the mind is willing but the body rebels,” Mr. Peel says. “Most chefs over 50 are no longer cooking daily.”

Mr. Peel came of age during an explosion of interest in dining out, and his workload expanded to keep pace. Many in the next generation of young chefs have seen the physical toll on their elders, and they are planning accordingly.

“There’s an arc,” says the chef Jonah Miller, 26, whose awareness of his “shelf life as an active cook” informed his decision to open his own restaurant sooner rather than later. That establishment, Huertas, a Northern Spanish restaurant, will open this winter in Brooklyn. It is a nod in equal parts to Mr. Miller’s youthful ambition — he first volunteered in a kitchen when he was 13 — and the “need to plan for the time when I’m not physically able to work the line, which for most cooks comes in their late 30s.”

“It’s a pretty hard-and-fast rule,” he says, that chefs eventually step away from the action; he aspires to the natural progression from cook to chef to “purely a coach and a mentor.”

Mitchell Davis, executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation, agrees that cooks can age quickly. “Every time I find myself eating in an exciting restaurant, the chef is 28 years old,” he says.

A chef’s early years are arduous, devoted to working the line — cooking some portion of what lands on the plate, shift after shift. In cities like New York and Los Angeles, where high rents and demanding diners require a chef to “maximize every minute of the day,” according to Mr. Davis, it is even harder.

“Cooking on the line is a sport,” says Mr. Miller, who played basketball and baseball in high school. “It’s regimented and it’s continuous. You’re always pushing, just like an athlete: the highest quality you can manage in a specific time frame, doing it again and again.”

Chefs are more likely to sustain injuries than the average American worker, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Sprains, strains and tears are the most common complaints, followed by cuts, lacerations and punctures; burns; and fractures, says Martin Kohli, chief regional economist for the bureau. Musculoskeletal injuries like Mr. Peel’s carpal tunnel syndrome are also common.

When asked to name chefs who have persevered in the kitchen past their youth despite the physical toll, Mr. Peel, Mr. Miller and Mr. Davis all hesitate for a long moment. Mr. Davis comes up with the New York-based Daniel Boulud and David Bouley, who have reputations for being active in the kitchen longer than their peers. But each example is served with a side order of disclaimer; they are the exceptions who prove the rule.

DealBook: Dutch Bank ABN Amro Takes Step Toward an I.P.O.

Sketch Guy: Diversification Isn’t Broken, It Just Takes a While

It’s a classic moment in sports history. With less than 20 seconds left in Game 6 of the 1998 N.B.A. finals and the Chicago Bulls down by one, Michael Jordan goes one-on-one with Bryon Russell of the Utah Jazz. He pushes off (clearly!), Russell stumbles and the ball hits nothing but net. Game over. Bulls win.

Now let’s imagine that something different happened. Jordan misses the shot in Game 6, and Game 7 comes down to the same spot: fewer than 20 seconds left with the Bulls down by one. If you’re Phil Jackson, the head coach, do you set up the last play for Jordan, or does the ball go to someone else? Remember, Jordan missed the night before.

Of course the right strategy is to put the ball in Jordan’s hands. Just because he missed the shot before doesn’t mean it was the wrong strategy to have Jordan shooting the ball in the final seconds. The odds are incredibly high that he will make the shot even though he missed it the night before.

I bring this up because it perfectly captures the investing adage that never seems to die: diversification is “broken.” It seems as if this story pops up every year, but it’s not really about anything new. Both Joshua M. Brown at The Reformed Broker and Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture have written blog posts about it recently. Mr. Brown quoted an adviser who said:

“Why bother diversifying at all? It’s just a drag on performance. What’s the point of owning any bonds or international stocks?”

So here’s the 2013 version of the diversification story.

Let’s say at the beginning of 2013 you finally decided you were going to stop pretending to be a trader and instead be a long-term investor. You were going to do what most of the academic research recommends and build a diversified portfolio of low-cost investments. Then you planned to hold on to it for a long time.

As part of your new plan, you put something like 30 percent of your portfolio in international mutual funds. Now seven months into the year, you’re disappointed because international has done poorly relative to your Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fund. In fact, year to date, your S.&?P. 500 index fund is clearly the only place you should have put all your money. Its gains have been twice those of almost any other major asset class.

Obviously, it was a mistake to diversify, right? Wait. Before you answer, let me share one of my favorite stories about diversification.

In 1998, the S.&?P. 500 ended the year up 28.6 percent. But nothing else was really performing. Small-capitalization stocks were down 2.2 percent, and small-cap value stocks were in the tank. The temptation to go all in on large-cap technology stocks proved to be too much for most of us. After all, nothing else was working.

Now fast forward to 2001. The tech bubble had burst. The S.&?P. 500 was down a bunch in 2000 and ended 2001 down 11.9 percent. Based on those numbers, it’s fair to assume the stock market was terrible, right? Well, it depends on which market you were talking about.

Remember those small-cap stocks that everyone was complaining about in 1998 and ’99? Sit down for this. In 2001, while the S.&?P. 500 was getting crushed, small-cap stocks returned 17.6 percent. And small-cap value stocks, down 10 percent in 1998, ended 2001 up 40.6 percent.

Wild!

I suspect your first thought to this example is, “Why not just buy things right before they go up and sell before they go down?” Let me save you a lot of money and many headaches. It’s all but impossible for investors to catch all the up while avoiding all the down. But it can be equally difficult for us mere mortals to stick with diversification because it looks as if we should be able to time the market, and, well, diversification isn’t sexy or exciting.

First, diversification works over time, and no, seven months doesn’t count. When we talk about diversification working, we’re talking in terms of years, even decades. Not just days, weeks or even months. In other words, we’re talking in investing terms, not trading terms. We don’t like things that take a long time to work. We want to know what’s working now.

Second, diversification is not exciting. It’s the investing equivalent of hitting singles and doubles your whole life, and who grows up wanting to do that? We want to hit home runs. Players who try to hit home runs every time (like timing the market) are going down swinging in a blaze of glory or knocking it out of the park. Either way, it’s cool, sexy and exciting — all the things diversification is not.

Finally, diversification can look like a mistake at any given moment. A well-designed and diversified portfolio will always have something that’s not doing well, a few things that are average, and, hopefully, one or two things that are exciting. The problem, of course, is that the investments change places about the time you’ve had enough and you decide it’s time to boot out the underperformers. It’s human nature to run from things that cause us pain and get more of the things that bring us pleasure. It’s why we look for ways to “fix” our portfolios.

It may seem counterintuitive, but if you have something in your portfolio that you’re complaining about, it’s a good sign you’ve built a diversified portfolio. And if that’s the case, you’re probably complaining right now about international mutual funds and wondering why you aren’t invested 100 percent in the S.&?P. 500. But as Mr. Brown so wisely notes, “Five months still to go, anything can happen …”

Next year, there will be a different story about why diversification is “broken,” but all it takes is looking at the year before that, then 5, 10, 15 and 20 years before that to see why you want to hit singles and doubles for the rest of your investing life. Personally, I’d rather save my energy for other things besides trying to second-guess which market will take off next. I’ve got better things to do. Don’t you?

Bits Blog: Hollywood Director Takes On Texting While Driving

DealBook: Third Point Takes Aim at Sony in Investor Letter

DealBook: What It Takes to Fully Engage Your Employees

Reed Saxon/Associated PressA Whole Foods store in Santa Monica, Calif. The grocery specializes in organic products.

Over the 15 years I’ve been consulting in the corporate world, I’ve only met a handful of senior leaders who had as a primary goal for their companies making a positive difference in the world.

Surely, there are more such people, including a good number who are highly philanthropic outside their work. Still, as best as I can tell, higher purpose is not a common characteristic of the corporate world.

I don’t say this to bash business, nor to make a moral case for why leaders ought to focus more on serving the greater good. I fully understand that a primary obligation of any business is to earn a profit, and that without one, nothing else is possible. I also know that no amount of righteous haranguing is going to prompt leaders to fully embrace priorities beyond the bottom line.

But what if they believed that articulating and embracing a nobler purpose would help them to attract, inspire and retain better employees, and ultimately make their companies more profitable?

As John Mackey and Raj Sisodia put it in their book “Conscious Capitalism,” “Just as happiness is best experienced by not aiming for it directly, profits are best achieved by not making them the primary goal of the business. They are the outcome when companies do business with a higher sense of purpose.”

Professor Sisodia’s research, which I’ve cited before, suggests that “conscious companies”— characterized in part by an explicit commitment to a higher purpose – outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index from 1996 to 2011 by an astonishing 10.5 to 1.

Much of this is common sense. All things being equal, would you rather work at a company focused solely on maximizing profits, or one with a deep commitment to adding real value to the world through its products, practices and services? Wouldn’t you find a greater sense of meaning by working for the latter, feel a greater sense of commitment and be less likely to leave?

Employee engagement in the United States (and throughout most of the world) remains depressingly low. According to the latest Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans are either not engaged or are actively disengaged from their companies. According to Gallup, the cost to productivity just from the actively disengaged employees is $450 billion to $550 billion a year.

In the simplest terms, a purpose defines the difference an organization is trying to make in the world. In some cases, that’s a natural and straightforward outgrowth of what the organization actually does to earn a profit.

Whole Foods, for example, is explicitly committed to helping people to eat well, as a way to improve the quality of their lives and increase their lifespan.

Patagonia sets out to model sustainable environmental practices by taking complete responsibility for every product it makes – repairing, recycling and helping people sell those products when they no longer need them.

Eileen Fisher, the clothing company, has a five-part mission that includes producing “only what we love,” creating a “joyful atmosphere in the workplace” and “supporting women through social initiatives that address their well-being.” Or put even more simply: “Have our mission drive our business and our profitability foster our mission.”

There are many ways to create a nobler purpose in an organization, even if the products or services themselves intrinsically do not. Toms Shoes, for example, makes a very conventional product, but founder Blake Mycoskie has infused passion among employees partly by giving away, with each purchase of a pair of shoes, a second pair to someone needy. Now Toms is expanding that model to other products, including eyewear.

The company is also consistently profitable, not least because its noble purpose is differentiating, and appealing to consumers. We live in a highly commoditized world. Why couldn’t a big bank differentiate itself by using a matching model like Toms does and offer, say, financial planning to those who are needy?

It’s also possible to build a noble purpose around caring deeply about your customers. Think of Amazon.com, Zappos, Ritz Carlton and Southwest Airlines. Likewise, you can create a higher purpose around the commitment to truly great products and inspiring design, as Apple did under Steven P. Jobs.

Here are three questions I believe all chief executives ought to regularly ask themselves, not just to be good citizens, but as a powerful way to build competitive advantage:

1. What is our noblest purpose and are we fulfilling it?

2. How can we give our employees a greater sense of meaning in what they do, so they feel more enthusiastic about coming to work every morning?

3. In what practical ways can we add more value in the world (and do less harm)?

Tony Schwartz is the chief executive of the Energy Project and the author, most recently, of “Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live.” Twitter: @tonyschwartz

Advertising: Executive From the Agency Grey New York Takes On a Larger Role

The executive is Michael Houston, who since last year has been chief operating officer of Grey New York, part of the Grey North America division of Grey. (Grey, in turn, is a unit of the Grey Group, which is owned by WPP.) Mr. Houston, who turned 41 on Wednesday, is being promoted to chief executive of Grey North America while continuing to share the leadership duties at Grey New York with Tor Myhren, who is president and chief creative officer there.

Mr. Houston’s promotion makes him one of four regional chief executives at Grey, all reporting to James R. Heekin, chairman and chief executive of the Grey Group. Mr. Heekin most recently handled the Grey North America duties with his other responsibilities.

Mr. Houston, in assuming his new post, becomes one of the few African-Americans in the executive suites of the large, mainstream Madison Avenue agencies — even, perhaps, the most senior. No black person has been chief executive of such an agency since 2006, when Ann Fudge, chairwoman and chief executive at the Young & Rubicam Brands division of WPP, retired. “By no means do I define myself only by that,” Mr. Houston said in a telephone interview. Still, “I do think it’s unfortunate that my appointment potentially makes me the highest-ranking African-American,” he added. “It sends a signal there aren’t a lot of African-American people in the industry in the highest ranks.”

That is problematic, Mr. Houston said, because “we’re meant to appeal to, tap into, popular culture” on behalf of marketer clients, “and it’s hard to do that without diversity.”

“I do applaud the industry for trying to diversify,” he added, but “in our industry ‘diversity’ ought to mean diversity of thought, diversity of background, different ages, different approaches, different sexual orientations. We need to ensure we’re taking the broadest definition of diversity, really being able to appreciate, respect and value others’ points of view.”

Mr. Houston joined Grey New York in 2007 as executive vice president and director for marketing after working at agencies that included Chiat/Day, Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners and Y&R as well as at firms like And Partners, Elias Arts and Landor Associates. He was named global chief marketing officer of Grey in 2010 and managing director of Grey New York in 2011.

“I think a lot of Michael,” said Catherine Bension, chief executive at SelectResources International in Santa Monica, Calif., which helps marketers with agency searches.

“He’s a terrific person,” she added, “and one of the young new leaders of our industry.” (Last year, Mr. Houston was named one of the “40 Under 40” by Crain’s New York Business.)

“Michael has been at Grey New York since the start of its transformation or metamorphosis into a more future-facing, more contemporary agency,” Ms. Bension said, referring to Grey New York’s winning a skein of new accounts with billings estimated at more than $3 billion, among them DirecTV, E*Trade Financial, Gillette, Marriott Hotels and Resorts, RadioShack and Sargento Foods (although one, E*Trade, recently departed.) She praised Mr. Houston for being “a great partner to the creatives” at the agency.

Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, the world’s largest agency holding group in billings, also had nice words about Mr. Houston.

“I’m delighted for Michael,” Mr. Sorrell wrote in an e-mail, describing him as “a key member of the Grey management team.”

Mr. Houston has “done an outstanding job,” Mr. Sorrell said, “and thoroughly deserves this recognition for his success, which is based on an exceptional track record.”

Mr. Heekin, in a phone interview, said he would be turning to Mr. Houston for three primary tasks: prospecting for new business, expanding services like digital and working on “a smart, strategic approach to expanding our footprint in the U.S.”

Grey North America has, in addition to Grey New York, offices in San Francisco, Toronto and Vancouver. It has no presence in other prominent American markets after closing offices in Atlanta, Los Angeles and other cities.

Among the markets Mr. Heekin listed as having potential were the Southwest and the Midwest, “whether it’s Chicago or Kansas City,” because “our footprint in the middle of the country is nonexistent.”

He said he would consider both starting offices and making acquisitions, and added that the latter was more likely, as he and Mr. Houston had already been talking to agencies that Grey might buy. In the meantime, Mr. Houston and Mr. Heekin are making changes in San Francisco, hiring Milan Martin as president of Grey San Francisco, succeeding Brad Fogel, who is leaving to pursue other interests, a spokesman said. Mr. Martin, 39, most recently was managing director and chief strategist at Anthem Worldwide in San Francisco, part of Schawk Inc.

“We’re getting things moving in San Francisco,” Mr. Houston said. “We’re excited about what we could do with the office if we can build on the history there and bring in some of the fervor we have in New York.” Clients of Grey San Francisco include Purolator, Reliant Energy and Symantec.

Mr. Houston’s new post includes other duties, among them overseeing Grey Activation and Public Relations. He will share the oversight of Wing, a multicultural agency with offices in New York and Miami, with Alain Groenendaal, who is president and chief executive of Wing and Grey Latin America.

Shortcuts: What It Takes to Make New College Graduates Employable

It’s that last part of the equation that I’m going to focus on. My heart sinks every time I read a news story or opinion piece quoting employers who charge that four-year colleges and universities are failing to provide graduates with the skills they need to become and remain employable.

Of course, in many ways, this isn’t a new story.

“A four-year liberal arts education doesn’t prepare kids for work and it never has,” said Alec R. Levenson a senior research scientist for the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California.

Mara Swan, the executive vice president of global strategy and talent at Manpower Group, agreed.

“There’s always been a gap between what colleges produce and what employers want,” she said. “But now it’s widening.” That’s because workplaces are more complex and globalized, profit margins are slimmer, companies are leaner and managers expect their workers to get up to speed much faster than in the past.

“Employers are under pressure to do more with less,” Ms. Swan said.

Unemployment rates for those with bachelor’s degrees or higher are still much better — at 3.8 percent in May — than those with only a high school diploma, which was 7.4 percent in May, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nonetheless, a special report by The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s Marketplace published in March found that about half of 704 employers who participated in the study said they had trouble finding recent college graduates qualified to fill positions at their company.

But, surprisingly, it wasn’t necessarily specific technical skills that were lacking.

“When it comes to the skills most needed by employers, job candidates are lacking most in written and oral communication skills, adaptability and managing multiple priorities, and making decisions and problem solving,” the report said.

Jaime S. Fall, a vice president at the HR Policy Association, an organization of chief human resources managers from large employers, said these findings backed up what his organization was hearing over and over from employers.

Young employees “are very good at finding information, but not as good at putting that information into context,” Mr. Fall said. “They’re really good at technology, but not at how to take those skills and resolve specific business problems.”

This isn’t a dilemma just in this country, but around the world, Ms. Swan said. A global study conducted last year of interviews with 25,000 employers found that nine out of 10 employees believed that colleges were not fully preparing students for the workplace.

“There were the same problems,” she said. “Problems with collaboration, interpersonal skills, the ability to deal with ambiguity, flexibility and professionalism.”

But it’s easy for the issue to degenerate into finger-pointing.

“If you sat down with a committee of professors, and told them students are not coming out with the skills they need, they would say, ‘you’re smoking something,’ ” Mr. Levenson said. “The trouble is, those skills are applied in a college context, not a workplace context.”

But, he added, “you can’t create a school-based curriculum that can help someone transition to being highly productive on the job in 10 days.”

In other words, the onus shouldn’t just be on universities; employers also need to step up to the plate.

The in-depth training programs and apprenticeships of the past are unlikely to come back, so companies must become more innovative in helping young employees come up to speed, according to a report released in May by Accenture, a management consulting and outsourcing company.

“Rather than simply bemoaning the inability to find employees with the skills required for available jobs, organizations must step up with new and more comprehensive enterprise learning strategies,” Accenture stated in a summary of The Accenture 2013 College Graduate Employment Survey, which queried 1,010 students graduating from college in 2013 and 1,005 who graduated in 2011 and 2012.

The problem, it said, is that most recent college graduates expect employers to provide on-the-ground training, but most of them don’t actually receive it.

DealBook: British Government Takes Step in Selling Stakes of Bailed-Out Banks

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Fair Game: S.E.C. Plan for Money Market Funds Takes Some Baby Steps

Given the onslaught of lobbying against Ms. Schapiro’s efforts, it is perhaps not surprising that Ms. White’s proposal is much more incremental than her predecessor’s.

Money market funds need tighter regulation because both individual and institutional investors rely on them as bank-account alternatives. These investors have come to believe that their holdings will never decline in value; $1 in will always be $1 available for redemption. But unlike banks, money funds do not have to set aside capital for either redemptions or losses. Therefore, money funds can be vulnerable to runs when shareholders stampede for the exits.

This is what happened after Lehman Brothers failed in 2008. The Reserve Fund, an enormous, institutionally held money fund that owned some of the brokerage firm’s debt, had to halt redemptions in an investor run. Recognizing that the potential for problems wasn’t limited to that fund, the federal government offered insurance to money funds during the crisis.

To prevent a future run on these funds, the new, nearly 700-page S.E.C. proposal offers two possible regulatory fixes. One would require some funds to abandon the fixed $1-a-share asset price and require the price to float, based on fluctuations in their holdings.

The idea here is to dispel the myth that each share of a money fund is worth precisely $1 at the end of every business day. That fiction has lulled investors into complacency about the funds’ safety and predictability.

But only prime institutional funds — which account for almost 40 percent of the overall market — would have to show floating net asset values under the rule. Money funds that invest mostly in government securities and those aimed at individual investors would be exempt. The S.E.C. said this was because government portfolios and retail funds hadn’t run into redemption problems.

The S.E.C.’s proposal “targets precisely the funds that ran the most in 2008,” said Norm Champ, director of the S.E.C. division of investment management, in an interview. “The S.E.C.’s staff economic study showed that institutional investors redeemed from money market funds at a much higher rate than retail investors during the 2008 financial crisis.”

It’s likely, though, that the panic would have spread to retail funds if the government hadn’t stepped in with its insurance program.

The proposal offers another attempt to prevent a run: a redemption charge. If any fund’s so-called weekly liquid investments fell below 15 percent of its total assets, the fund could impose a 2 percent fee on all redemptions. (Weekly liquid assets are typically cash, United States Treasury securities and instruments that convert into cash within seven days.) Once a fund crossed the 15 percent threshold, its overseers could also halt redemptions for as long as a month, allowing an orderly sale of assets as well as time for panicked investors to cool down.

The fund industry may not like some of this, but it is sure to be delighted about what is absent from the S.E.C.’s proposal. Unlike last year’s version, this one does not require money market funds to set aside capital to protect against mass redemptions.

Setting aside capital is the best way to protect shareholders from funds that take excessive risks, as well as from the perils of a panic, says David S. Scharfstein, a professor of finance and banking at Harvard Business School and an expert on money funds.

“The run doesn’t just come from a fixed net asset value,” he said in an interview last week. “It comes from the underlying assets that are illiquid.” He prefers a capital requirement of between 3 and 4 percent.

The industry, which sees required capital set-asides as anathema because they crimp profits, would have fought such a provision as fiercely as it did the last time. The S.E.C. may have found it preferable to propose a rule that was workable, not dead on arrival.

Another criticism of the rule, Mr. Scharfstein said, is that while it purports to provide investors with a true market value for a fund’s holdings, it offers significant leeway in determining those valuations. It would not require funds to assign prices based on market transactions on securities that come due in 60 days or less. The fund could value those at the cost it paid to buy them, so long as the fund’s directors thought that the prices represented fair value.

But those valuations may not reflect what a fund would really receive in a sale. “Most money market fund assets mature in less than 60 days,” Mr. Scharfstein said. “This could allow them not to mark to market a fairly large fraction of their portfolios.”

The greatest strength of the S.E.C.’s proposed rule is that it would require greater transparency, bringing money funds out of the Dark Ages where disclosures are concerned. It would require funds to divulge material matters, such as when the 15 percent threshold is crossed for liquid assets or a relatively large holding goes into default. And what if a fund gets into trouble and requires the financial support of its parent? Investors would be told.

Finally, under the rule, the funds would have to report their holdings within five days of each month’s end, rather than the two months they can wait now.

“The proposal would require funds to disclose information that investors have never had access to before,” Mr. Champ said. “It will be a major step to increasing investor knowledge and understanding of the product.”

Now that the rule has been proposed, the S.E.C. will field comments for 90 days.

Could the rule be stiffened? Probably not by the S.E.C. Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets Inc., a nonprofit advocating effective financial regulation, said regulatory proposals usually weren’t expanded beyond their initial outlines.

But, he said, there is a possibility that the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the regulatory group created under the Dodd-Frank law, may toughen the rule. In November, after the S.E.C. failed to come up with an acceptable proposal, the stability council suggested three money fund reforms. They went beyond the S.E.C.’s rule, proposing either a floating net asset value for all money funds, or capital buffers.

“The F.S.O.C. has the power and authority it needs to address systemic risks,” Mr. Kelleher said. “If the final rule is weak and deficient and leaves a significant systemic risk to the financial system unaddressed, they have the duty to act under the law.”

Whether they will is another issue. Clearly, the battle for safer money funds is far from over.

Square Feet: Ambitious Paris Project Takes Shape in the Suburbs

In response, the city government has begun an ambitious program of large-scale, mixed-use developments on the periphery. The goals are twofold: creating an engine for economic growth while preserving the Belle Époque Paris beloved by tens of millions of tourists; and integrating the prosperous city with struggling inner-ring suburbs, or banlieues.

Though France, and much of Europe, remains mired in economic malaise, one such development, the Clichy Batignolles project in northwest Paris, is gaining momentum this year after more than a decade of planning.

The first residents moved in last fall, the second phase of a much-loved and much-needed park is close to completion, an office complex that will be owned by the New York real estate company Tishman Speyer is seeking tenants, and site preparation is nearly done for a soaring courthouse designed by Renzo Piano’s studio that will be one of the tallest buildings in Paris.

Mr. Piano first made his mark in Paris with the radical Pompidou Center in the mid-1970s. He acknowledged that the courthouse and the Clichy Batignolles project were taking Paris in a different direction — but a necessary one, he argued in an interview at his Paris workshop.

“We are celebrating a shift in the history of the town,” he said. “We are bringing the fertilizing elements to the periphery. You are changing something, and changing something is not easy.”

By the numbers, the 133-acre project is impressive for any city: 12,700 projected jobs; 3,400 housing units, subsidized and market-rate; 1.5 million square feet of office space; 410,000 square feet of public facilities, including schools; 334,000 square feet of shops and services — and 90 courtrooms and offices to accommodate some 8,000 people a day in the 524-foot-tall courthouse.

Garbage and recyclables will be collected with a system of pneumatic tubes, sharply cutting emissions and odors. Buildings with “green” roofs with vegetation, slabs of photovoltaic cells and geothermal heating point to an ambitious goal of carbon neutrality.

The project will offer commuters and residents a range of transportation options, including two new Metro stations, an extension of the tramway that nearly circles the city, a regional rail station and a 600-space underground parking garage.

But Paris being Paris, the prospect of high-rise offices, glossy apartment blocks and a large influx of low-income housing has not been received with great enthusiasm.

Brigitte Kuster, the maire, or mayor, of the 17th Arrondissement, protested that the area already had a large amount of subsidized housing, said Hubert Jamault, her chief of staff. Ms. Kuster, he said, “is not against the construction of social housing, but she does not want all the difficulties to be concentrated in the same place.”

Now, he said, after a petition drive, appeals to the city council and “numerous” public meetings with the city, her concerns have largely been addressed.

The decision to allow buildings up to 50 meters tall (about 160 feet) “has been the subject of a broad dialogue with local residents,” said Anne Hidalgo, a deputy mayor of Paris and a champion of the project. (The courthouse is an exception.)

Ms. Hidalgo, a leading candidate for mayor in elections next year, said the height of the buildings would be in proportion to the park — similar to Central Park in New York — and would allow for innovative architecture, and views and light for inhabitants.

“I’m quite happy with the results,” Ms. Hidalgo said via e-mail, “which offer Paris a new neighborhood that is ecological, a pleasant place to live, innovative in all ways, very Parisian, and resolutely turned toward the future.”

Clichy Batignolles, named for the adjoining neighborhoods, was first planned in 2001 under Mayor Bertrand Delanoë of Paris and Ms. Hidalgo, said Didier Bailly, director general of Paris Batignolles Aménagement, the corporation formed to oversee much of the project.

In the subsequent years, transportation, housing and office components were added, and — reminiscent of the Hudson Yards development in Manhattan — the site became a centerpiece of Paris’s bid for the 2012 Olympics, which were captured by London.

By 2008, Mr. Bailly said, all the components of the project were in place with the deal to build the courthouse. That year, though, the persistent recession that the French call “la crise” struck.

“The crisis means that investors are extremely demanding,” Mr. Bailly said. “They have means, but they’re very attentive to how it’s invested; they want to ensure the safety of their investment.”

Some developers have delayed building in Clichy Batignolles, hoping that the market will improve. No large commercial tenants have yet committed to the project.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 22, 2013

Because of an editing error, a summary with an earlier version of this article misstated the size of the Clichy Batignolles project in northwest Paris. It is 133 acres, not 154.

In House, Maxine Waters Takes New Tack on Banks

OVER her 22 years in Congress, Maxine Waters has likened bank executives to “gangsters,” snarkily addressed them as “captains of the universe” and threatened to tax their companies “out of business.”

The Democrat from Los Angeles, in other words, is not known for showing love to the financial industry.

So in March, when she visited a group of community bankers in a conservative corner of her district, she seemed ready for a chilly reception. “Let’s see what these guys have to say for themselves,” Ms. Waters said with a smirk as she emerged from her S.U.V.

Escorted to a private conference room at Malaga Bank, Ms. Waters grabbed a seat at the head of the table. A dozen or so bankers shuffled in, each armed with a tale of woe about the Dodd-Frank banking overhaul passed by Congress in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

The law is too tough, they groaned. Its capital requirements are too steep. One banker’s voice quivered as she described a regulatory examination of her bank. Another griped about regulators overstepping their bounds: “They can tell you how many pens and pencils we have in our drawers!”

In the past, such grumbling might have set off Ms. Waters’s famous hair-trigger temper. But with each complaint, she leaned in for more, nodding appreciatively. “We’ve heard they chase down silly stuff,” Ms. Waters said, referring to regulators and shaking her head in disapproval. “I’m willing to take a hit” to help lower the capital requirements, she said. She even suggested the bankers hire new lobbyists to better represent them. “Influence us,” Ms. Waters said softly, reminding them of her new role as the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee. “Help us understand the intricacies of your business.”

This was not “kerosene Maxine,” the nickname Ms. Waters has earned for her tendency to hurl flammable remarks. (Exhibit A: She once screamed onstage in Los Angeles that “The Tea Party can go straight to hell, and I intend to help them get there.”) Rather, she was all empathy, vowing to use her new sway in Washington to protect the bankers’ interests. “You have a lot of good will right now,” she said. As for Dodd-Frank, Ms. Waters said she stood ready to defend the law, but also instructed the bankers to compile a “laundry list” of their concerns. “I don’t want you to look at this as being impossible to tweak,” she said.

After an hour of swiveling nervously in their chairs, the bankers broke into grins. One executive slapped Ms. Waters a high-five. Another embraced her.

“You’ve softened,” Paul C. Hudson, the chairman of Broadway Federal Bank, teased Ms. Waters. “I love the new Maxine.”

The New Maxine was born in part from Ms. Waters’s ascension, in January, on the House Financial Services Committee. Exonerated in September at the end of a three-year ethics investigation, she replaced Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, for whom the banking overhaul bill was named.

The influential Financial Services Committee oversees community banks and Wall Street alike. And Ms. Waters has softened somewhat, not just toward local bankers in her district who might expect her ear, but also toward the Wall Street C.E.O.’s she formerly reviled.

In recent months, she dined with John Stumpf, the C.E.O. of Wells Fargo, and met Wall Street chief executives like Michael L. Corbat of Citigroup and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase. It’s what she called “an open-door policy.” Most notably, given her penchant for railing against Wall Street abuses, she recently pushed regulators to delay certain rule changes on high-stakes derivatives trading. The regulators ultimately agreed.

The move may seem at odds with her track record as a rabble-rouser and consumer activist. In her long committee tenure, Ms. Waters positioned herself to the left of fellow Democrats, making her name on issues like affordable housing and foreclosure prevention. Ms. Waters acknowledged that “some of my friends will not agree” with all of her recent decisions. But after two decades in Congress, she says she has learned to pick her battles.

One battle emerged in recent days. In the face of intense lobbying pressure, Ms. Waters voted on Tuesday to oppose several House bills that would water down Dodd-Frank, a move that one consumer advocate called “gutsy.”

BuzzFeed Takes Steps to Add Foreign News Coverage

BuzzFeed, the swiftly growing social news site, has decided it is time to move beyond top 10 lists, animal videos and political coverage. It is going foreign.

Ben Smith, the editor in chief of the social news site BuzzFeed.

The site recently posted a hiring notice for a foreign editor that said BuzzFeed wanted “to build a new kind of national security and world news coverage.”

Ben Smith, the editor in chief, confirmed that the foreign editor was the beginning of a new line of coverage. He said he expected to have as many as six reporters work with the new editor, with some in Washington, some covering topical issues and a couple based overseas, most likely in Cairo and Mexico City to start.

Mr. Smith said adding more extensive foreign coverage was a natural step in the company’s expansion, but he added that the timing was prompted by the Boston Marathon bombings. The resulting interest, he said, showed him the site was becoming a breaking news source for users.

“People have increasingly come to us for news like during the Boston bombings,” he said. “Now we have an audience that wants to learn what’s going on in the world.”

BuzzFeed is following other digital sites that have added dedicated foreign correspondents. The Huffington Post has operations in Canada, Britain, Spain, France and Italy, with editions opening in Japan and Germany this year. While most of the employees are from media outlets that are in essence licensees, there are at least some Huffington Post workers at every site, said Peter Land, a spokesman for the parent company, AOL.

Still, it is not a common practice. Mashable, another news site, has employees overseas but they do not specifically cover foreign news. Instead they allow the Web site to track digital trends there. Mr. Smith said he hoped to use the foreign correspondents in imaginative ways — for example, to cover news on gay marriage internationally.

State of the Art: Canon N Takes On Phone Cameras

Incoming waves: tablets, e-books, movies online. Outgoing waves: Desktop PCs, landline phones, anything on disc, tape or paper.

It’s fascinating to watch outgoing industries struggle to remain relevant. Take, for example, the outgoing wave known as pocket cameras. No wonder nobody is buying them anymore. Your phone takes pictures nearly as well and is far more convenient.

You always have your phone with you, and you can transmit the photos wirelessly as soon as you take them.

But Canon, the world’s No. 1 camera maker, has dreamed up an ingenious response to the phone-camera threat. It’s a camera designed to attack the cellphone threat on three fronts.

First, it emphasizes the features that a smartphone can’t match, like a zoom lens. Second, it imitates the workings and design features of a smartphone. Third, it can transmit new photos to your phone for immediate sending or posting online. The result, the Canon N ($300), is half pocket camera, half photo-taking accessory for your phone.

In the category of features a phone camera lacks, the Canon N starts by offering a powerful zoom lens — 8X, compared with zero X on a smartphone. Digital zoom, where the camera just enlarges a photo to make it seem as if you’re closer, doesn’t count.

The N also has a much bigger, more sensitive sensor and lens. Now, the N’s sensor isn’t very big for a camera — it measures 0.4 inches diagonally — but it’s much better than what’s in a typical phone. Finally, the N’s screen flips out 90 degrees, so you can take photos at interesting angles.

The second category, imitating a phone’s design and operation, is more intriguing. The Canon N is one of the weirdest-looking cameras you’ve ever seen. It’s a nearly square, nearly featureless block, in black or white.

It has only three physical buttons, all tiny: Power, Play and Connect to Phone. As on a phone, the rest of the controls are all on the touch screen.

Now, you might have noticed that that list does not include “shutter button”; this camera doesn’t have one. Instead, you take a picture by pressing up or down on the silver plastic ring around the lens, which budges slightly and clicks.

And what, you may ask, is the point of that design? Simple: This camera works equally well upside down or at 90 degrees. Like a phone, it detects which way you’re holding it and flips the screen image accordingly. Thanks to this ring-shutter system, you can take a shot no matter how you’re holding the camera.

Left-handers might also appreciate this setup; it frees them from the tyranny of right-side shutter buttons. The downside of the shutter ring is that it’s very skinny and right next to the equally thin zoom ring. Often, you snap a shot by accident when you’re just trying to zoom.

The upside-down feature also mitigates the limitations of the flip-out screen, which has a hinge that is far less ambitious than the ones on other cameras. When you hold the camera upright, the flipping out aids you only in taking photos of low-down subjects (that’s low down as in “children and pets,” not “yellow-bellied scoundrels”). But because you can use the camera in any orientation, the flip-out screen also helps you take pictures holding the camera over your head or even around corners.

Even so, the screen can never face you, so it’s no help when you’re taking self-portraits — a real shame.

There are other cellphone similarities. There is no external battery charger; you charge the battery in the camera, by connecting a USB cable to your computer or a wall adapter. The battery itself looks like a squared-off AA battery; it’s tiny. Canon says it’ll give you about 200 shots on a charge, which is very low.

Slipstream: Personal Data Takes a Winding Path Into Marketers’ Hands

“What’s in it for you?” said the flier from MS LifeLines, a support network for patients and their families that is financed by two drug makers, Pfizer and EMD Serono. “Strategies for managing and understanding your symptoms. Information about available treatments for relapsing M.S.”

The thing is that my friend, who requested that I keep her name out of this column, does not have multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system.

But last year, she did search online for information about various diseases, including M.S., on a number of consumer health sites. She also subscribed to an online recommendation engine where she looked up consumer reviews of local physicians.

Now she wondered whether one of those companies had erroneously profiled her as an M.S. patient and shared that profile with drug-company marketers. She worried about the potential ramifications: Could she, for instance, someday be denied life insurance on the basis of that profile? She wanted to track down the source of the data, correct her profile and, if possible, prevent further dissemination of the information. But she didn’t know which company had collected and shared the data in the first place, so she didn’t know how to have her entry removed from the original marketing list.

In our data-happy society, the case of the mistaken M.S. patient illustrates a lack of visibility for people interested in how information about them changes hands. When consumers fill out warranty cards, enter sweepstakes, answer online surveys, agree to online privacy policies or sign up to receive e-mails from brands, they often don’t realize that certain details — linked to them by name or by customer ID code — may be passed along to other companies. That can make it hard for people seeking to correct errors to find the keepers of their marketing profiles.

I was ruminating on that problem in Washington on Wednesday, when I paid a visit to Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat, who has made consumer privacy one of his signature issues.

Americans, he says, should be allowed “to be left alone.”

In part, this belief stems from his own nature. He describes himself as an introvert, a person who would rather stay at home and listen to Bach fugues than attend Beltway shindigs. But mainly, he just thinks that privacy is a fundamental American right.

“The principles are remarkably simple,” Mr. Rockefeller said, comfortably installed in an armchair in his Senate office. Americans, he continued, should have the right to decide what kind of marketing material is sent to them and what other people know about them: “People have the right to be private insofar as it’s possible in the modern world.”

Earlier that day, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, of which Mr. Rockefeller is chairman, had convened a hearing on the status of an online privacy mechanism for consumers called Do Not Track. The idea behind it is that people should be able to turn on settings in their Internet browsers to signal advertisers, data brokers and other third-party operators not to collect information about their activities across the Web. Advertising networks and other entities would theoretically honor those don’t-track-me flags by restricting the amount of information they collected.

But years after the Federal Trade Commission recommended that advertisers adopt such a browser-based system, consumer advocates and ad industry groups still seem at odds over fundamental issues — including the very definition of Do Not Track. In an attempt to pressure the ad industry to get with the program, the Senate committee held a hearing.

“I want to get to the bottom of this controversy,” Mr. Rockefeller said in his opening statement. “I want the witnesses to publicly explain exactly what they believe has gone wrong, and what they are prepared to offer to make Do Not Track a reality for consumers.”

Yet he acknowledges that this kind of privacy option for online consumers, even if it eventually goes into effect, does not address a larger issue: the thousands of details that third-party data gatherers, who typically don’t interact directly with consumers, have already amassed about a majority of adults in the United States. For instance, there is no federal law that requires such companies to allow consumers to have access to and correct marketing data that’s been compiled about them. That is partly why the Senate committee opened an investigation last year into the practices of leading data brokers.

Mr. Rockefeller says the investigation is continuing.

So I decided — after asking permission from the friend who received the M.S. flier — to see if I could find out how erroneous information about her health status moved from one company to another. It wasn’t an obvious trajectory.

Erin-Marie Beals, a spokeswoman for EMD Serono, told me that MS LifeLines sends marketing materials only to people who have indicated an interest in multiple sclerosis and have provided their contact information either directly to MS LifeLines or through other programs, like online surveys or subscriptions. Ms. Beals pointed me to the firm that had provided my friend’s information — the KBM Group, a marketing company that specializes in consumer data and analytics.

Ultimately, Barbara Palmer, the senior vice president for marketing at the KBM Group, told me that her firm had obtained the information from a survey company whose online questionnaire my friend had filled out in 2010. That survey, Ms. Palmer said, asked general questions, including some about health interests. She said it also contained a specific disclosure: “By completing the health-related questions on the survey, you are consenting to the use of this information for direct marketing purposes.”

Ms. Palmer added that her company honored people’s requests to opt out of its file. The Direct Marketing Association also provides a program for consumers who want to opt out of receiving all kinds of pitches by mail.

At the end of the day, information about my friend ended up in the hands of at least two companies she had never heard of, let alone interacted with. Other companies may also have obtained the data.

The proliferation of intimate details about people’s health, financial or academic status — even when the data are correct — particularly troubles Senator Rockefeller. Although laws like the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act limit the use of people’s credit and medical records, data brokers are often able to compile consumers’ financial and health information through other means.

“One of the things that really disturbs me in privacy, or the lack of it, is the way that data brokers can go in and buy all your health records, your financial records — they can get it one way or another,” Mr. Rockefeller said during the hearing. “What is of you, they can have.”

He added: “We are talking about a very, very large industry here which can decide to do that and which is doing that.”

E-mail: slipstream@nytimes.com.

All Nippon Airways Takes Dreamliner With Improved Battery on Test Flight

A 787 carrying top executives from Boeing and All Nippon took off amid clear skies from Haneda Airport on Tokyo’s waterfront Sunday morning and landed, apparently without incident, after a flight of about two hours. In the past week, regulators in the United States, Europe and Japan have all signed off on the battery fixes.

Smaller airlines are already moving ahead in reintroducing the jet to their fleets, including Ethiopian Airlines, which used a 787 Saturday on a two-hour commercial flight from the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya.

But the resumption of 787 flights at All Nippon and Japan Airlines, which together own half the 50 Dreamliner jets Boeing has so far delivered, will prove the real test of whether the modified batteries will eliminate further mishaps, as well as passenger response. Both airlines have said they hope to resume scheduled commercial flights in June. All Nippon said it may introduce Dreamliners on some flights before then.

“The flight went as planned, with absolutely no problems,” Shinichiro Ito, president and chief executive of All Nippon, told about 70 reporters and photographers who witnessed the plane land. “This is a big step toward flying again.”

Japanese and American regulators have been investigating the lithium-ion batteries aboard the 787 after a fire on Jan. 7 in a Japan Airlines 787 parked at a gate at Boston’s Logan Airport. A second incident later that month, involving a similar battery on an All Nippon Airways plane on a Japanese domestic flight, triggered an emergency landing and led to the worldwide grounding of the planes.

Boeing engineers say their fixes to the batteries — which include better insulation between the eight cells in the battery, gentler charging to minimize stress and a new titanium venting system — eliminate all potential causes of battery fire. But the engineers also acknowledged that they may never know what caused the batteries to overheat on the Japan Airlines and All Nippon aircraft because the battery cells were so damaged.

Besides Boeing’s repairs, Japan’s Transport Ministry has requested that All Nippon and Japan Airlines also install improved battery monitoring systems on its planes, and put its 787 cockpit crews through additional flight training. Once the planes are back in service, the airlines will also take a sample of batteries every few months for tests to make sure the improvements are working.

Boeing executives expressed relief at the flight’s success.

“It was a perfect flight on a perfect day,” said Ray Conner, executive vice president of the Boeing Company and chief executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “The flight was just spectacular. I mean, just to have the airplane back in the air was a great feeling for a of us, quite an emotional feeling. To be down for three months is a very long time.”

“We are very confident in the solution that we’ve developed, the design changes that we’ve made, and the testing that we’ve used to validate the design,” he added. “I speak for all of us that we would put our families on this airplane any time.”

Boeing’s 787 Takes Flight to Assess New Battery

The company said it would analyze the results of several weeks of testing, which included blowing up the batteries in labs, and then forward the results to the Federal Aviation Administration, probably early next week. Aviation analysts said the F.A.A., which has overseen the testing, could approve the changes later this month if no other problems surface, and the planes, which have been grounded since mid-January, could be flying again in May.

Boeing has “a very good chance” of winning federal certification for its fixes, said Richard L. Aboulafia, an analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va. But, he said, “there is a lot of political and regulatory uncertainty that could get in the way.”

The National Transportation Safety Board, which has been investigating a battery fire on a 787 parked in Boston on Jan. 7, plans to hold a public forum on Thursday and Friday on transportation uses of lithium-ion batteries, which are more volatile than traditional designs. On April 23 and 24, it will hold a hearing on its investigation into the Boston fire and the deficiencies in the F.A.A.’s initial review of the batteries several years ago.

Those hearings could add to a sense of political caution at the F.A.A., though its engineers have said they believe that Boeing’s changes are working. “And this is all complicated by the fact that Boeing doubled down on this approach and does not have a backup plan,” Mr. Aboulafia said.

The innovative planes were grounded worldwide after a 787 made an emergency landing in Japan with a smoking battery just nine days after the fire in Boston.

Aviation analysts estimate that Boeing and several airline customers could lose hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of the grounding, and Boeing is pushing to get the planes back in the air. Investors are also optimistic. Boeing’s stock rose $1.22 to close at $86.17 on Friday, adding to a rally that began after the F.A.A. approved the testing plan last month.

Boeing said the plane flown in Friday’s test was awaiting delivery to LOT Polish Airlines. The jet left Paine Field in Everett, Wash., at 10:39 a.m. Pacific time with a crew of 11, including two representatives from the F.A.A. The airplane flew for 1 hour 49 minutes, landing back at the field at 12:28 p.m.

Boeing said the flight was meant to demonstrate that the new battery system would work as expected during normal and abnormal flight conditions, though it did not specify the range of conditions it tested.

It said that the test flight was uneventful and that it would deliver the data to the F.A.A. “in the coming days.”

The F.A.A. approved more than 20 types of tests to determine if the new battery system would virtually eliminate the risk of battery fires, as Boeing says it will.

Federal investigators have said that one cell short-circuited in the battery on the plane in Boston and that the short cascaded through the seven other cells, setting off the fire.

Boeing has said that its new battery system has better insulation around the eight cells and between the cells and the casing. It also has a gentler charger to minimize stress and a new titanium system to vent any smoke or heat out of the plane to keep the batteries from getting too hot.

The insulation, made of heat-resistant glass fibers, is supposed to keep a short in one cell from spreading to others. Boeing said the two batteries on each plane would be sealed inside steel boxes that would limit the amount of oxygen nearby to minimize any chance of fire.

Most of the tests have been conducted inside Boeing labs. Friday’s flight was the only one to test the performance of the new batteries in the air. Boeing recently flew two other flights to test other systems on the plane.

The batteries are used to start the planes and to provide power on the ground. Boeing has said that it needs only a single test flight since the batteries are not normally used in flight.

If the plan is approved, Boeing and the airlines will have to monitor the batteries closely for many months. The safety board has said Boeing grossly miscalculated the odds of hazards with the original battery system. It also now has to persuade travelers that the new system is safe.