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Globalization in Troubled Times - By Pankaj Ghemawat, Steven Altman and Phillip Bastian
In 2016, the United Kingdom voted for Brexit and the United States elected Donald Trump, spelling, for many analysts, a major setback to globalization. However, the latest DHL Global Connectedness Index -- the first comprehensive globalization study to contain data from 2017 -- is quick to put this idea to rest. Looking at global connectedness on a worldwide level, by region, and for 169 countries with historical coverage back to 2001, the data show that globalization actually increased to a record high in 2017.
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Trump's AI Initiative Missed Opportunity to Address Immigration and Data - By Robert Seamans
On Monday, President Trump signed an Executive Order launching the “American AI Initiative.” The goal of the initiative is to promote American artificial intelligence (AI) to “increase our Nation’s prosperity, enhance our national and economic security, and improve quality of life for the American people.”
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How Globalized is the World Today? – By Steven Altman
Steven Altman, executive director of NYU Stern's Center for the Globalization of Education & Management, shares findings from DHL's 2018 Global Connectedness Index.
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'High Flying Bird' Will Entertain You and Leave You Thinking - By Dolly Chugh
This weekend, Netflix dropped a buzzy new movie called High Flying Bird. A cross between Jerry Maguire, Ocean's 11, and Nine to Five, the film is about “when an NBA lockout sidelines his big rookie client [and] an agent hatches a bold plan to save their careers – and disrupt the league’s power structure”. Directed by Steven Soderbergh (director of the Ocean's 11 franchise, Erin Brockovich, and Sex, Lies, and Videotape), it is being described as a “slam dunk” as well as an “exhilarating … caper.” I, too, found the movie highly entertaining as it followed a rogue sports agent played by Moonlight star André Holland through his negotiations with star players, hardball lawyers, and quick-thinking assistants. He does the business equivalent of a fake crossover dribble, determined to win the game.
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A Mixed Economic Bag in 2019 - By Nouriel Roubini
After the synchronized global economic expansion of 2017 came the asynchronous growth of 2018, when most countries other than the United States started to experience slowdowns. Worries about US inflation, the US Federal Reserve’s policy trajectory, ongoing trade wars, Italian budget and debt woes, China’s slowdown, and emerging-market fragilities led to a sharp fall in global equity markets toward the end of the year.
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Why Journalism Urgently Needs a Domestic Marshall Plan - By Michael Posner
This week a commission of prominent experts sounded an alarm about the precarious state of the news media in the U.S. and the resultant danger to our democracy. They rightly emphasized that trust in the news media is at an all-time low and that a changing business environment has left local newspapers in dire straits. In response, they are proposing a series of practical recommendations aimed at strengthening traditional media companies and urging new digital platforms to accept significantly greater responsibility for their business conduct.
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What the Next President of the World Bank Should Do - By Paul Romer
As the World Bank’s board considers nominations for the institution’s next president (Donald Trump is expected to nominate David Malpass, the US Treasury department’s top official on international affairs), there are two critical ways he or she can make the bank more effective.
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The State of Globalization in 2019 and What It Means for Strategists - By Pankaj Ghemawat & Steven Altman
Globalization, since the Brexit and Trump shocks of 2016, has been shaped by a tug of war between economic fundamentals and policy threats. But predictions that globalization would collapse under a wave of economic nationalism have proven no more accurate than proclamations of a flat world that dominated the global business discourse a decade ago. The new DHL Global Connectedness Index (which we co-authored with Phillip Bastian) demonstrates that the world ended 2017 more globalized than ever before.
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Scaling up Analogical Innovation with Crowds and AI - By Hila Lifshitz-Assaf
Investment in research is at an all-time high, yet the rate of scientific breakthroughs isn’t setting any records. To resolve this quandary, scientists are turning to artificial intelligence and crowdsourcing for help in identifying a key inspiration for innovation — the perfect analogy.
—— Research Highlights
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The Truth about Rosa Parks and Why it Matters to Your Diversity Initiative - By Dolly Chugh
Mind blown. It was like when I found out who Luke Skywalker’s father was or the Wizard of Oz was. I felt the same way when I read The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis. This rigorously and vigorously researched biography invites the reader to follow Parks' story as it really unfolded. In doing so, Theoharis also invites the reader to consider why this more fascinating true story is told far less often than the children's book version which most of us know (a topic she further explores in her latest book A More Beautiful and Terrible History and through a gold mine of teaching resources for educators). February 4 would have been Parks’ 106th birthday. If you believe in what she did and why she did it, it is time you knew who she really was.
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Why the Davos Move of Major Global Companies on LGBTI Rights is so Important - By Michael Posner
There are few human rights issues in the U.S. on which public attitudes have changed more quickly and greater progress has been achieved than those relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. Though initial progress was slow, over the last 20 years, advances have been swift and dramatic.
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Super Bowl 2019 Advertising Predictions: Will Brands Bring Their A-Game? - By Priya Raghubir
What ads really work in the Super Bowl? Humor? Kids? Animals? Sex? The surprise “unveiling?” If history is any indication, any and all combinations of these elements multiply a brand’s chances of producing a winning ad campaign.
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Why the UK Government Needs to Do More to Combat Modern Slavery - By Michael Posner
More than 35 million people around the world are subject to modern-day slavery, a quarter of them children. Victims include women who are trafficked for prostitution or forced marriage and people coerced into bonded or forced labor. In recent years, there has been a growing international effort to persuade governments to address modern slavery more aggressively, including by holding companies legally accountable for abuses in their global supply chains. This initiative has been led by organizations like Focus on Labor Exploitation (FLEX), Anti-Slavery International, and KnowTheChain, and it has been supported by such organizations as the Freedom Fund and Humanity United.
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Five Myths About Globalization - By Steven A. Altman
While world leaders converged on Davos, Switzerland, this past week to discuss “Globalization 4.0” at the World Economic Forum, President Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May stayed home to deal with globalization-related crises: a government shutdown over Trump’s demand for a border wall and Parliament’s rejection of May’s Brexit deal. Meanwhile, U.S.-China trade tensions continued to roil financial markets, and trade conflicts contributed to another downgrade of global growth forecasts. The political crossfire over globalization has propagated a raft of myths. Here are five of the most prevalent.
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Making Way (hopefully) for 5G - By Lawrence White
To the applause of economists — not to mention stakeholders in the vast wireless communications industry — the FCC has driven the transformation of America’s deeply inefficient system from one that regularly assigned spectrum use by government fiat to one based on market allocation. A substantial portion of the “airwaves” is now flexibly licensed under a structure in which the government retains formal ownership, but licensees have considerable latitude to use or transfer their “rights” to others.
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