Viewed in The Wall Street Journal The rise to the top of a corporation, as nearly any corporate executive can attest, is hugely competitive. The reality is that, when it comes to securing CEO roles, there are vastly greater numbers of aspirants than there are openings. Logic dictates that this competitiveness might lead some aspirants… More
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Viewed in McKinsey Quarterly When companies face major strategic initiative and projects, it can be tempting to assign them to a high-performing executive. But this temptation overlooks the reality that such executives are already stretched thin on their existing time commitments. This McKinsey Quarterly article argues that companies need to do a vastly better job… More
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Viewed in Winton.com Commodity cartels, which were formed after World War II to attempt to establish stable (and lucrative) prices in some commodities, have largely failed in achieving that goal. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which was formed by large petroleum exporting countries to control the price of oil, had some success… More
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Viewed in The Wall Street Journal Careers in large law firms aren’t what they once were, even if you are a partner. Historically, becoming a law firm partner was a ticket both to long-term employment affiliation and wealth. “Being named a partner once meant joining a band of lawyers who jointly tended to longtime clients… More
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Viewed in Inc. “Good communicators know how they’re going to answer questions about their company’s products, financials, or vision. They don’t ramble or give convoluted responses. They use words that are precise and assertive. And there are few leaders who do it better than Apple CEO Tim Cook,” Carmine Gallo writes. But what words are… More
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Viewed in Deloitte Insights How much do we really know about what makes a successful corporate board of directors? To be sure, we could stand to know more. In an effort to add to this knowledge base, Deloitte initiated 50 conversations with Fortune 1000 CEOs about their perspective on corporate boards. A few themes emerged:… More
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Viewed in Fortune Fortune has just released the 2019 edition of “Global 500,” its annual listing of the world’s 500 largest companies by revenue. With $514B in annual revenue, the largest company on the 2019 list (by far) is Walmart. This year’s listing of the world’s largest companies reveals two macro trends. First, many companies… More
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Viewed in Forbes What’s the world’s most valuable commodity? For many years, it was oil. “But things have changed in recent years,” Forbes contributor Michael Ashley writes. “Oil has been dethroned.” Taking its place has been the commodities of the ascending technology industry. As a headline in The Economist put it last year, “The world’s… More
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Viewed in South China Morning Post China-based Alibaba opened its business-to-business platform to the U.S. last month in a push to challenge Amazon. Alibaba believes its U.S. offering represents a value proposition for U.S. business-to-business customers. Alibaba is offering clients a flat membership fee of “a couple of thousand dollars a year,” Alibaba’s head of… More
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Viewed in McKinsey We read lots about CEOs, but how does a CEO actually spend his or her time? It is a question that confounds even some of the world’s top business management experts. One such example is Michael E. Porter, a Harvard Business School professor, who forthrightly acknowledged a decade ago that “we had… More
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Viewed in CBInsights Technology unfolds in phases, and we are in the midst of yet another groundbreaking one right now. Facial recognition technologies are likely to transform much of customer transactions across multiple industries in the years to come. “Biometic technology such as facial recognition can quickly and accurately identify individual people and their emotional… More
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Viewed in CBInsights Global business is filled with clichés and often repeated trends that sound and look great yet ultimately offer little. But they do provide insight to the fact that we can take these things way too seriously. CBInsights takes a humorous look at 19 tactics to “make your corporation look more innovative.” The… More
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Viewed in Forbes. Forbes this month completed its 17th annual Global 2000 list, which ranks the world’s largest publicly-traded corporations. Among the findings: The United States continues to lead the world as the headquarters for these large companies; 575 of the 2000 are based there. China comes in a fairly distant second with 309 and… More
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Viewed in Harvard Business Review. A new Upwork survey reveals some hugely significant statistics about the growth of the American freelance workforce. Over the past five years, its U.S. ranks have grown by 3.7 million workers to now comprise over a third of the total U.S. labor force. The trend now even has a coined… More
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Viewed in Crunchbase. Most universities do not give out degrees on how to launch a startup, business and technology columnist Joanna Glasner correctly observes. But where do startup entrepreneurs obtain their university educations? This article and report summarize both the universities and the business schools that graduate the most startup founders who raised $1 million… More
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Viewed in Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg, who has partnered with us on several corporate research projects, teamed up with Harvard Business School researcher Tricia Gregg to analyze, with the aid of two technical tools (NVivo 12 Pro and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC)), Amazon’s annual letters to shareholders over… More
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Viewed in The Times of India. What attributes do companies seek in their most senior executive? The answer to that question is evolving, particularly as companies increasingly see value in several prominent soft skills, including humility, humanity, humor and hope. The search for these executives reflects a growing recognition that inclusion and consensus-building are key… More
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Viewed in Spencer Stuart. Organizational leadership can be a very lonely undertaking, but that can be overcome at least partly with competent and trusted advisors. Yet, trust is hard to come by in an advisor. Stephen G. Patscot, who heads Spencer Stuart’s human resources practice, writes that one his colleagues “recently quoted a statistic that,… More
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(Despite Trying Really Hard) Viewed in Inc. Despite the best of intentions, most people struggle with productivity. But what can be done to overcome this? Inc. contributor Matt Plummer identifies four not so obvious and even counter intuitive solutions: First, think in terms of high “present value.” This means that investing time up front to… More
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Viewed in AlternativeData.org. The data explosion is undeniably obvious across industries. But it is especially prevalent on Wall Street, where the number of buy-side mutual funds’ employees engaged in alternative data including geolocation, satellite, web and payment data, has grown by almost six times over the past five years. Alternative Data provides a helpful overview… More
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