Americans might be forgiven for basking in self-satisfaction when it comes to the economy. The country’s most prominent CEO, Jamie Dimon, has called the country’s boom “unbelievable,” and its most stimulating magazine, The Atlantic, has dubbed it a “superstar.”
Mario Draghi wants Europe to follow the United States and China down the road marked “industrial strategy.” As Europe’s most influential economist — a former head of the European Central Bank, prime minister of Italy and technocrat supreme — Draghi had enormous leeway in preparing his report on European competitiveness.
Ever since Rishi Sunak’s rain-sodden announcement to call a general election on July 4, one question has hung over British politics: Will Labour win by a landslide or just a regular majority?
Michael Jensen, who died on April 2, did as much as any single thinker to shape modern financial capitalism, particularly as it is practiced in the Anglo-Saxon world.
Something odd is happening to the world’s most valuable resource. Time is simultaneously speeding up and slowing down. We live in a world of instant communications and superfast internet. We also live in a world of infrastructure projects that crawl along for decades.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is capable not just of disrupting higher education but of blowing it apart. The march of the smart machines is already well advanced. AI can easily pass standardized tests such as the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) and the GRE (Graduate Record Examination) required by graduate schools.
We live in an age of goody-goody business. Companies wear their compassion on their sleeves in the form of ever more elaborate rainbow flags and inclusivity statements.
The Harvard Business Review is celebrating its 100th birthday with a fat book of its most influential and innovative articles and an electronic fanfare of videos, charts and online articles.
Working-from-home is so well established that it has its own acronym (WFH) and, presumably, its own syndrome. But what happens if you can’t abide the idea of even two days a week in the office?
The parallels between the 2020s and the 1970s grow more numerous by the day. The economy faces the threat of stagflation. Fuel prices are surging, and shortages loom. Politicians are flailing. The international environment is deteriorating. The Supreme Court is revisiting the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.
The last three years have been so relentlessly dismal — a global pandemic followed by the invasion of Ukraine — that it is tempting to idealize the old days. Just as the survivors of World War I looked back on the Edwardian era as one long country house weekend (“Stands the church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?”), so we observers of Ukraine’s agonies may think of the pre-Wuhan world as one of peace and prosperity. Yet in fact it was an era of sustained disappointment punctuated by the occasional crisis.
There is no shortage of candidates for the title of the most dangerous business idea of the moment. Management-by-algorithm may remove what humanity there is left in the corporate world. The office-less future may dissolve workers into angst-ridden atoms. I want to suggest a less obvious contender for the title: “social purpose.”
