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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Viewed in Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway Chairman of the Board Warren Buffet’s annual letters to shareholders have become one of Wall Street’s most broadly-reported communications, important not just for what they say about the year gone by but equally important about what it says about the investment and macroeconomic trends likely to move the… More
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Viewed in Bloomberg Businessweek with Michael P. Regan. Echoing Buffet’s “buy and hold” theme for successful investing, Bloomberg’s Michael P. Regan argues that active buying and selling of equities remains an immensely complex and time-sensitive undertaking, and that most investors—even those who manage large funds for a living—have proven largely ineffectual at it. The most… More
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Viewed in The Wall Street Journal with Christopher Mims. What was old is new again. With emails, companies do not depend on gatekeepers to reach their addressees. While Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter remain popular social media outlets for corporations, recent privacy concerns and complexities with each platform’s algorithms have many companies once again seeing great… More
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Viewed on TomTunguz.com with Tomasz Tunguz. Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist with Redpoint Ventures, attended SaaStr, and this article summarizes his presentation there on the research data report he co-authored. Tunguz and Chase received an impressive 600 corporate responses to their survey on Software as a Service (SaaS) companies’ experiences with free BtoB product trials…. More
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Viewed in The New York Times with Richard Perez-Pena. The United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union back in June 2016. Yet, going on three years later, their departure has finally been scheduled for this March 29. One of the benefits of the EU is the development of standards that permitted goods to travel… More
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Viewed in The Wall Street Journal with Elizabeth Bernstein. This Wall Street Journal article tackles the reality of the 21st century marriage: As much as prominent executives, like all of us, take our marital vows expecting them to be for life, the reality of divorce statistics force us to address the reality that not all marriages… More
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