Its real worry remains regulationSOCIAL NETWORKS know a thing or two about virality. Still, Facebook was probably surprised by the speed at which a small protest, begun on June 17th by a collection of American civil-rights groups, has gained steam. By July 1st the #StopHateForProfit campaign, which accuses it of publishing material that incites violence,…
Remodelling the global alliance with Renault and Mitsubishi will be tougherNISSAN IS IN for a makeover. On July 15th the Japanese car giant will unveil what is rumoured to be a sleeker, more minimalist logo more in line with the contemporary aesthetic. To its boss, Uchida Makoto, the redesign is the outward expression of deeper…
AS LAWS GO, the dictum devised by C. Northcote Parkinson, a naval historian, was admirably succinct: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” His essay, first published in The Economist in 1955, has stood the test of time, in the sense that people still refer to “Parkinson’s law”. But the…
SCHUMPETER IS ONLY an amateur stargazer. His equipment is no fancier than a pair of eyes and a place in the countryside, away from London’s light pollution. That is enough to make out Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—and, occasionally, the International Space Station crossing the firmament. In the past few years a new spectacle has…
China’s leading chipmaker looks unfazed by Uncle Sam’s semiconductor sabre-rattlingTIMES SEEM tough for China’s chipmaking champion, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC). Over the past year America has attacked its supply chains, cutting it off from essential high-tech tools. It has slapped export controls on SMIC’s customers and enacted new rules which threaten to designate…
“TOO OFTEN, executive compensation in the US is ridiculously out of line with performance…The deck is stacked against investors.” It was with these words that in 2006 Warren Buffett, a legendary investor and red-blooded capitalist, challenged the received wisdom in corporate America about CEO pay. This maintains that bosses deserve generous rewards because these are…
America’s government viewed one gay-dating app with Chinese ties as a national-security concern. Can another that has just listed in New York expect similar treatment?“I USED TO think that I was the only person in the world attracted to people of the same gender.” So begins Ma Baoli’s letter to investors. The 43-year-old Mr Ma…
A managerial quality that is hard to define but important to possessTHE PANDEMIC has required many people to make difficult judgments. Politicians have had to decide which restrictions to impose on citizens’ behaviour and individuals were forced to assess how much personal risk to take. Managers, faced with tough calls like which parts of their…
Japanese firms are more vulnerable to cyber-attacks than Western peersJAPAN HAS a reputation for technophilia. Robots have even been enlisted to cheer players at professional baseball games while covid-19 keeps fans away from stadiums. Yet when it comes to more humdrum information technology (IT), the country lags behind other advanced economies—nowhere more so than in…
CHINA’S BUSTLING digital economy has spawned thousands of startups. Yet in the eyes of many it remains “BAT or bust”, to cite a saying among jobseekers from the country’s elite universities. The BAT in question refers to the original trio of Chinese internet stars: Baidu, a search engine; Alibaba, an online emporium; and Tencent, a…