Kraft Heinz’s Breakup: The End of Mass Produced Food?
It was a mega-merger of iconic brands, supported by no less a genius than Warren Buffett. It was supposed to unlock value for investors and rethink how food would be […]
Americans Are Pretty Smug About Tech Leadership. They Shouldn’t Be.
America stands at a dangerous crossroads in the global race for green technology supremacy. While European nations surge ahead with coordinated multi-trillion dollar investments and China dominates manufacturing with record-breaking […]
The Gen Z Crisis
The Gen Z Crisis Generation Z – born between 1997 and 2012 – are preparing for college, entering the workforce, and are at the beginning of their professional and educational […]
The Great Productivity Paradox: Why We Measure Everything Except What Makes Life Worth Living
Since the days of Adam Smith, we have credited rising living standards with an improvement in productivity, typically manufacturing productivity. But as we are on the cusp of a revolution […]
Why you would have a strategic edge if you’d attended “Leading Strategic Growth and Change” in the 90’s
It’s fun to reflect on how my course “Leading Strategic Growth and Change” has evolved over the years. I first took over as the Faculty Director for the course in […]
The Merger Mirage: The Triumph of Hope over Experience
Synergy. Market expansion. Gaining share. Cost savings. Diversification. Talent acquisition. Owning a unique asset. Moving into a high-growth sector. These and many more reasons have often propelled companies into one […]
High-quality service jobs and the advent of a new golden age?
As MIT’s Zeynep Ton has pointed out, the U.S. suffers from a deluge of bad jobs, many in the service sector. While some suggest trying to revive manufacturing as the […]
The Digital Deception Economy: How Bot Farms Distort Social Signals
In a digital environment, sentiment has become currency. How customers, investors, and the public feel about your content directly affects performance metrics, from revenues to reputation to stock price. But […]
Have business books jumped the shark? The “peak book” hypothesis
Publishing a book used to be a rite of passage for would-be pundits, experts, speakers and more. Books once provided credibility, presence in the market and an audience for new […]
Interns! We have interns! Welcome to the tribe
As Garry Ridge, the former CEO of WD-40 says, in his wonderful book Any Dumb-Ass Can Do It, citing Sebastian Junger, “The earliest and most basic definition of community – […]
The Benefits of Bureaucracy: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Red Tape
Throughout much of human history, power was exercised through a system of patrimonialism, as the great sociologist Max Weber coined the term. Under patrimonialism, a leader exerts power without respect […]
Boggled by radically increased uncertainty? You are not alone
January is now in the rear-view mirror (gasp) and a new administration is in office in the United States. 45 executive orders and a massively disruptive freeze in federal spending, […]
Is AI coming for your job? Depends on who you ask
Astonishingly, the age of AI introduced by the November, 2022 release of ChatGPT has been around long enough that we’re starting to build up what you can think of as […]
Why the party’s over at Party City, but Build-A-Bear Workshop is Thriving
We’ve been talking about the retail apocalypse for quite some time now. And the sector sure has had its problems – from rapacious Private Equity investors who burdened their properties […]
Join me at the Conference Forbes declared one of the top 5 to attend this year- April 29-30 in Dublin
We’ve all been to conferences that are either a bunch of talking heads or even worse, panel after panel after panel without a lot of new insights or actionable ideas. […]
2025: Are you able to turn navigating uncertainty into an asset?
The coming year promises to be one in which long-held assumptions about how business works are going to be thoroughly upended. While this might seem threatening, historically, periods of uncertainty […]
2024 Year in Review: Surprising ways human ingenuity thrives through inflections
There is no shortage of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) to go around. As Futurist Amy Webb points out in her 2024 SXSW talk, we’re in the midst of a […]
Escaping the outrage machine – Is Bluesky becoming a thing?
As my Thought Sparks guest Steven Brill points out, absence of accountability for content posted on social media sites, plus algorithms that favor content likely to attract eyeballs have led […]
“It’s as though the Albanian army was going to take over the world”
Where better to learn about the potential and the pitfalls of AI than at MIT! I was thrilled to join the program as part of the opening panel, “GenAI: Disruptive […]
How powerful women outsmart conventional fashion design
When women first started flooding into professional workplaces in the 80’s, they faced a dilemma – what to wear? High fashion didn’t look professional. Female versions of men’s suits just […]