Bruno Roche, chief economist and Catalyst managing director for global food producer Mars, explains how the “Economics of Mutuality” can benefit businesses all over the world For more than five decades, Mars Incorporated—a multinational family-owned company, makers of iconic brands like M&Ms, Mars, Snickers, Dove, Uncle Ben’s, Pedigree, Royal Canin, Wrigley’s and more—has invested […]
The Future Depends on Your Risk Attitude
In addition to the “black swan”, a term which refers to improbable and unforeseeable events, is the “gray rhino”, an expression coined by Michele Wucker to describe highly probable threats that have a potentially high impact yet are often ignored. Why do leaders and decision makers so often fail to address obvious dangers before they spiral out of control? That is the topic of Wucker’s book, The Gray Rhino, which is essential reading for managers, investors, planners, policy makers, and anyone else who wants to understand how to avoid getting trampled in an increasingly changing world.
Reading the Tea Leaves: Shen Jianguang on the Chinese Economy
A new year is a time for fresh starts and new beginnings. At least, that is what policymakers in Beijing will be hoping. The second half of 2018 produced some negative headlines on the economy as a domestic deleveraging drive and the intensifying trade war with the US slowed growth and undermined confidence. Will these headwinds continue battering the Chinese economy or will Beijing be able to engineer a recovery? There are few people better placed to answer this question than Shen Jianguang, one of China’s most respected economic analysts, whose career has included stints at the European Central Bank, IMF and OECD.
How China’s Menswear Brand HLA Became so Successful
Over the past five years, the business model of China’s clothing industry has been unraveling. For decades, China’s vast apparel industry competed mainly on price. But with labor, land and raw materials costs rising, environmental regulations tightening and competition becoming ever fiercer, even many of China’s best-known brands have struggled. There has been one exception: HLA. The Jiangsu Province-based menswear label has grown stronger even as competitors shuttered hundreds of outlets. In this interview, Li Lode, Professor of Operations Management at CKGSB and Professor Emeritus at Yale University, explains how HLA’s success has been made possible by smart strategic decisions.
AI and Finance: Have We Reached the Tipping Point?
In the eyes of insiders, if you are not talking about “AI and Finance,” then you risk being left behind–just as stubborn holdouts in another era were stranded when they failed to accept the Internet. Traditionally, finance has had two core functions: to lower transaction costs and to improve asset pricing. The use of the Internet has undermined the first by enabling more direct transactions, and AI is now disrupting the second by improving the speed and accuracy of asset pricing. Threatened by this are services like asset allocation, investment advisory and insurance pricing, which affects not only banks, but also investment and insurance firms.
Deirdre McCloskey on the Chinese Economy: The Great Enrichment
China led the world technologically in the early 15th century, yet Europe surpassed it overnight. How did this come about? Maverick economist Deirdre McCloskey offers an answer in her work. Although in her youth she fell under the sway of socialist economists, she brings an iconoclasts’ view to her subject believing it is wrong to limit the achievements of humanity to academic theories concerned solely with maximization of utility. Her latest book, Bourgeois Equality, is the concluding volume in a trilogy that seeks to explain “The Bourgeois Era,” which she believes laid the basis for the material and spiritual wealth enjoy by the modern world.
How Hard Is It to Cut Chinese Government Debt?
Debt is a ticking-time bomb for the Chinese economy. In the past three years central government stopped local governments from financing through investment vehicles and set a cap for the issuance of bonds. But new forms of debt continue to be formed. Local officials appear not to care about borrowing more, as long as the money can be used in projects that may translate to political achievements. And with those achievements, officials will be promoted to a higher level–as will the debt burden. A more worrisome thought will be: can those additional government debts and investments support China’s long-term growth?
Larry Summers on China: Market Rewards Should Be Equally Distributed
The Chinese economy faces some serious problems, including a slowing GDP growth, environmental degradation and financial disequilibrium. According to Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration, there are some specific solutions, such as making sure that opportunities for children are the same regardless of where in China and to whom they are born, making sure that the success of enterprises depends on the quality of what they sell and taxes are collected in a fair way and, finally, making sure that those who lead enterprises and communities do so for the benefit of their stakeholders.
Mohamed El-Erian on Central Bank Effectiveness and China
Central banking is not enough. While monetary policy did much to recover from the global financial crisis, its instruments have been largely exhausted and rendered ineffective. Low interest rates and quantitative easing may have kept the engine spinning, but are not pillars of sustainable economic policy. In China, there might still be scope for more monetary easing, but Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic advisor at financial services group Allianz and formerly at the helm of investment firm PIMCO, warns that, ‘‘China needs to avoid the trap that the advanced countries have fallen into, namely that of excessive prolonged reliance on central banks.’’
Countering Supplier Power: Can an Employee be Too Good?
Managers instinctively think about the threat of competitors because they can push down prices and lower profits. But there are other threats to profits that managers should not ignore. One of these is the threat that suppliers can pose. This idea was formalized and called “supplier power” by Harvard economist Michael Porter in 1979. The idea is that even with little competition a firm can still lose profits to a supplier that has significant bargaining power. But the situation gets even more complicated when the people bearing the supplier power are its own star employees. What should a company do about that?
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