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How Palantir Falls Short of Responsible Corporate Conduct - By Michael Posner
In a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post, Alex Karp, the chief executive of a data-analysis company called Palantir, warns that when Silicon Valley executives “try to impose their moral framework on America, something has gone seriously and dangerously awry.” Public policy decisions, he adds, need to be made by “elected representatives and judges, not by unelected engineers running global businesses.” But Karp fails to acknowledge that companies like Palantir decide with whom they do business and have an obligation to address the harmful consequences of their business relationships. This responsibility rests not only on tech companies but on all corporations.
—— Opinion
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How Japan Can Win in the Ongoing AI War - By Arun Sundararajan
Can Japan compete in the global battle for dominance in artificial intelligence and robotics that is under way? A long-standing strength in AI research gives the United States an advantage that is reinforced by the deep bench of AI talent at its numerous universities and tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
—— Opinion
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How YouTube Needs to Address Politically Motivated Disinformation - By Michael Posner
YouTube has a serious problem with disinformation, but the company’s senior leadership continues to wish it away. A recent blog post by YouTube’s CEO, Susan Wojcicki, exemplifies the problem. Wojcicki celebrates the many ways the company adds value to society while sidestepping it’s most difficult challenges. Not least among these challenges is the manipulation of video images on the YouTube platform to advance various political agendas.
—— Opinion
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If Hospitals Made Efforts to Go Green, Health Care Costs Would Go Down - By Cassandra Thiel and Tensie Whelan
Here’s another reason why health care costs so much—massive amounts of waste and energy use. An example: Flu season is coming up and health care workers are required to get a flu shot, generally by colleagues using single-use gloves. A medical facility with 30,000 employees that requires everyone to be vaccinated using gloves would release over three metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions if landfilled, and six metric tons if incinerated. (Each pair of gloves weighs 33 grams, totaling nearly one metric ton of gloves).
—— Opinion
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Why Electric is Driving the Future of Auto Luxury - By Tensie Whelan
Back in the day, the internal combustion engine in the automobile solved many problems—including what to do with all the horse manure that was piling up. Not incidentally, it also transported people more quickly and reliably to where they wanted to go. Today, we have a bigger problem—what to do with the greenhouse gas emissions piling up. And, not incidentally, we also have an interest in being transported in a more comfortable, customizable way that ultimately allows us to transform our cars into our living room or our office.
—— Opinion
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Beyond Article 370: A Road Map for Kashmir’s Economic Development - By Vasant Dhar
Although the method chosen by the Indian government of removing Article 370 has been unfortunate, seven decades of reality suggest that it did not work, and if anything, was regressive from a development standpoint. Democratic methods, including all-party delegations, interlocutors, and negotiations with Pakistan to stem the tide of militancy in Kashmir, have not worked either. India had two choices: To try something new or let the situation fester indefinitely.
—— Opinion
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Disinformation and the 2020 Election - By Stern Center for Business and Human Rights
A new report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights assesses some of the forms and sources of disinformation likely to play a role on social media during the 2020 presidential election campaign in the U.S.
—— Research Highlights
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Libra: A Dramatic Call to Regulatory Action - By Kim Schoenholtz
Facebook’s 18 June 2019 announcement that it has created a Geneva-based entity with plans to issue a currency called Libra sent shock waves through the financial world. Key central bank regulators such as FRB Chairman Jerome Powell warned against a “sprint to implementation” (see above).
—— Opinion
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The End of Shareholder Primacy? - By A. Michael Spence
This month, the Business Roundtable, a group comprising the CEO’s of America’s largest and most powerful corporations, formally abandoned the view that maximizing shareholder value should be a company’s primary objective. The implication is that shareholders will no longer always take precedence over other stakeholders such as customers, employees, suppliers, and the communities in which firms operate. In its statement justifying the move, the organization cites the need to pay fair wages, provide more benefits, and invest in training to help employees navigate a rapidly changing economy.
—— Opinion
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The Anatomy of the Coming Recession - By Nouriel Roubini
There are three negative supply shocks that could trigger a global recession by 2020. All of them reflect political factors affecting international relations, two involve China, and the United States is at the center of each. Moreover, none of them is amenable to the traditional tools of countercyclical macroeconomic policy.
—— Opinion
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The Business of Business is Creating Value (Which Leads to Profits) - By Tensie Whelan
The Business Roundtable this week released a statement announcing a new focus on creating value for all stakeholders, not just shareholders. But what does it mean, and how can the 200 executives who signed the statement follow through? What do Bechtel Group, American Express, Chubb, Target, Carlyle Group, JPMorgan and Tishman Speyer have in common? Their CEOs were just six of the nearly 200 executives who signed the Business Roundtable’s new “Statement on the Purpose of the Corporation,” taking out a full two-page ad in the Wall Street Journal on August 19 to explain the need to move on from the idea that “corporations exist principally to serve their shareholders.” As a customer or an employee of a company, we have all at one time or another experienced the challenge of feeling that the company is putting profits before customer experience or employee benefits or the community.
—— Opinion
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Are Your Company’s Strengths Really Weaknesses? - By Adam Brandenburger
Look at a map of the world drawn upside down. It’s a good way to challenge your assumptions about the way the world is — especially which continents and oceans are bigger and which are smaller. Looking at the business world upside down has a similar effect: It challenges your assumptions about company characteristics and what they mean for an organization.
—— Opinion
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I Do Not Need Feedback! Or Do I? Self-Efficacy, Perspective Taking and Feedback Seeking - By Elizabeth Morrison
In “I Do Not Need Feedback! Or Do I? Self-Efficacy, Perspective Taking, And Feedback Seeking,” Professor Morrison and co-author, Elad N. Sherf, explored the personal and interpersonal dynamics of feedback seeking. They designed a series of five studies, utilizing different methodologies and samples of employees, to probe the extent to which people’s self-efficacy is related to their asking for feedback from managers, subordinates, or peers.
—— Research Highlights
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The Hidden Plastic That’s Clogging Our Oceans - By Tensie Whelan
Why it’s not as easy to see as you might think, and how you can make everyday changes to reduce your plastic use. This spring I was on a cruise off Bermuda, some 650-plus miles off the mainland United States. The sea was azure—the color of the sky on a clear blue day. The water was crystal clear other than a few golden strands of sargassum seaweed. I was on the boat with an intrepid group of major plastic producers and users (Dow Chemical, Clorox, Nestlé Waters, Coca-Cola), nonprofit organizations (Greenpeace, WWF), social entrepreneurs, investors, funders and academics like me. We were gathered by SoulBuffalo, our host, to experience the ocean plastics challenge firsthand and to use our time confined together at sea to determine what we might do about it. And there was horror lurking beneath.
—— Opinion
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The Gap Between Large and Small Companies Is Growing. Why? - By Baruch Lev
Research and news headlines are replete with the idea that traditional large companies can’t innovate, and that smaller digital companies will render many larger ones extinct. While we’ve seen numerous startups of the last thirty years not only disrupt businesses but become the megacorporations of today, we wondered whether this disruption is accelerating with the momentum of digital revolution. In particular, we wanted to see whether large established corporations are being increasingly displaced by new technologies, or whether they’re actually leveraging digital and other new technologies to innovate and grow.
—— Opinion
