Society’s expectations of business have evolved a great deal in recent years. But one constant has been the demand that companies obey the law. That has always been bedrock. But what happens when law and regulation becomes fluid, sometimes even unmoored from plain written statute? Consider just a few examples of the past weeks. In Switzerland this […]
When a publicly-traded company makes the decision to buy back a large number of its own shares, it is by default saying to the world: “We are prioritizing the use of some of our current capital to reduce the number of shares we have outstanding, which will increase the value of each remaining share for […]
As so often happens in the wake of a high-profile corporate crisis, a great many commentators have faulted the rail carrier Norfolk Southern Corporation for its failure to “control the narrative” around its derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The premise of these critiques is that by failing to communicate more assertively –– including clearer and louder expressions […]
Is it possible for businesses to lead a rational conversation about… emotion? In 2023, it’s not terribly controversial to suggest that the political discourse has become emotional to the point of being nearly detached from rational argument or analysis. Our economy, too, often seems driven by fears that don’t seem grounded in facts; for example, […]
As institutional investors increasingly prioritize environmental, social, and governance (#ESG) considerations in their investment decisions, public companies are under growing pressure to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability. With over $20 trillion in global assets under management (AUM) focused on ESG-specific funds, and projections suggesting that this figure could exceed $50 trillion by 2026, the stakes […]
Scarcely a year ago, the most popular computer science course at most major universities was about #blockchains. Few people in the business community had heard much about general purpose transformers (#GPT) or Large Language Models (#LLM). Machine learning systems were certainly playing a meaningful role in back-office and other behind-the-scenes functions like inventory optimization –– but […]
Last week, #Google parent company #Alphabet lost about $100 billion in market value after its artificial intelligence chatbot #Bard –– hastily unveiled after OpenAI‘s #ChatGPT had captured the world’s imagination –– fell flat. It’s easy to read this as a classic story of a big, slow-moving Google Goliath being beaten by OpenAI, the swift, agile David. Perhaps there is some truth to that. But […]
Among the many weird, wonderful, and slightly terrifying experiments with ChatGPT recently, one anecdote stands out: a Democrat member of the House reading into the Congressional Record a speech —– written by ChatGPT –– in support of a bill to create a joint US-Israeli Artificial Intelligence Research Center. Over the course of just a few months, we’ve witnessed the […]
April 2022 By Steve Weber and Arik Ben-Zvi BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s annual letter to shareholders in late March declared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the unprecedented economic sanctions that have cut Russia off from large swathes of the global economy are the last nails in the coffin of late 20th and early […]
By Arik Ben-Zvi and Steve Weber A shortened version of this piece was originally published in Noema Magazine. When Karl Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation in 1944 he could have hardly imagined that — nearly 80 years later — the story of Web 3 would repeat nearly verbatim the narrative of state-society-market interdependence that he […]