A Growing Wave of Activist CEOs The CEOs of Dick’s Sporting Goods, Delta, and Citigroup, by responding publicly to the Parkland school shooting, joined a growing group of business leaders speaking out on contentious issues. Harvard Business Review offers an update on CEO activism, leading with how Marc Benioff triangulates employee support with organizational values, […] Read More »
How Amazon Rebuilt Itself as an AI Company By connecting projects across the enterprise, luring machine learning experts with ambitious products, and combining AI tools with cloud services. Wired shares the fascinating story of how Amazon created their AI flywheel, which includes offering machine learning-as-a-service to AWS cloud customers: Yes, Google may offer customers super-fast, […] Read More »
CEOs’ Existential Threat The tech-adoption cycle has sped up so rapidly that any CEO not personally leading a digital transformation in their companies will inevitably fail, says Tom Siebel, chairman and CEO of C3 IoT. On the coming corporate extinction event and those CEOs who are reinventing the transformation playbook: When I see CEOs who may […] Read More »
Understanding the Global AI Talent Race Technologists and economists have warned that China is poised to dominate in AI. If China has the strategy to compete, the US holds the resource advantage, says a report from Chinese tech giant Tencent. Per The Verge: Canada has strong educational background (which has attracted many big companies to launch […] Read More »
Finding Optimism in Retail This year’s Cyber Monday was the single biggest online shopping day in US history, with $6.6 billion in sales. Focusing solely on e-commerce misses a key storyline, as Fast Company suggests. It profiles companies thinking creatively about brick-and-mortar experiences and how they differentiate from Amazon. Target, for example, is focusing on its exclusive […] Read More »
Politics Is Failing America – and Business The US political-industrial complex – supported by a network of lobbyists, super PACs, and the media, among others – has built up a duopoly that hurts citizens and businesses, argue Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter and former CEO Katherine M. Gehl. Their new report looks at strategies […] Read More »
Six Ideas That Made Us Think 1. The BS Business Do not miss Lucy Kellaway’s long, magnificent rant against “corporate claptrap.” Drawing on 25 years of listening to self-important, bloated clichés, she gives example after embarrassing example of meaningless business jargon. Among the many gems, former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrends stands out with “the most […] Read More »
Six Ideas That Made Us Think 1. This Is How You Write About Hard Rock On the 30th anniversary of Def Leppard’s monumental hair-metal album, Hysteria, Rob Havilla writes an unforgettable encomium. Is it tribute or parody? Does it even matter? Every sentence is brilliant: If you stacked every stripper pole ever utilized during a […] Read More »
Six Ideas That Made Us Think 1. How Friendly are the Skies? If you are a nervous flyer, skip this article in Harvard Business Review. It argues that automation of the cockpit has introduced new risks: Automation provides massive data-processing capacity and consistency of response. However, it can also interfere with pilots’ basic cycle of […] Read More »
Confronting Cyberwarfare Evolving cyber threats demand greater agility from security officers to protect a corporation’s most valuable – and vulnerable – assets. A Spencer Stuart study profiles how companies build better responsiveness by staffing cybersecurity teams with talent outside of IT and rethinking the CISO’s role: “More sophisticated CISOs are social butterflies; they’re very collaborative. […] Read More »
