TECH AND health care have a fraught relationship. On January 3rd Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, a startup that once epitomised the promise of combining Silicon Valley’s dynamism with a stodgy health-care market, was convicted of lying to investors about the capabilities of her firm’s blood-testing technology. Yet look beyond Theranos, which began to implode…
In today’s business world, it’s more common than ever for employees to work remotely. While there are many benefits to this arrangement,…
We’re at a new phase of the working-parent crisis — a widespread breakdown of communication between hardworking mothers and fathers, frontline managers, and senior leaders. Two years into the pandemic, we’re losing our grip on one of the most powerful tools to get to someplace better on the other side: our ability to talk to…
When it comes to engaging with competitors, most brands take an antagonistic approach — think the age-old rivalry between Coke and Pepsi, or the memorable “Mac vs. PC” ads. However, new research suggests that praising the competition can actually boost a brand’s image and profitability. For example, in one study, consumers who saw a tweet…
Organizations today spend great sums of money on creativity training, hoping that it will spur innovative and entrepreneurial thinking among the ranks. Unfortunately, most of this training just doesn’t work. Why not? Because it puts too much faith in the powers of “divergent thinking,” or the random generation of new ideas — a process most…
FEW COMPANIES are more emblematic of the tech-obsessed, easy-money era of the early 21st century than SoftBank, the Japanese investment conglomerate founded and run by Son Masayoshi, or Masa for short. Starting life as an obscure Japanese software distributor in 1981, it has made one debt-fuelled bet after another to become an internet firm, a…
Why the technology-industry narrative of the 2010s no longer stacks upTHERE COMES a time in every great bull market where the dreams of investors collide with changing facts on the ground. In the subprime boom it was the moment when mortgage default rates started to rise in 2006; in the dotcom bubble of 2000-01 it…
When interviewing for jobs, it’s hard to know what to do when you have an offer in hand but are hoping a different company will also make you one. You want keep the offer you have on the table, but you also want to see how the hiring process plays out at the other company.…
Data-based decisions by AI are almost always based on probabilities (probabilistic versus deterministic). Because of this, there is always a degree of uncertainty when AI delivers a decision. There has to be an associated degree of confidence or scoring on the reliability of the results. It is for this reason most systems cannot, will not,…
A MESSY WORLD is great news for those whose business it is to sort through a mess. One group in particular has had a fabulous time of late. “Business demand across every market has been strong,” beams Elliott Portnoy, chief executive of Dentons, the world’s fourth-biggest law firm by revenues. In 2021 Dentons, a product…