Thu. Oct 22nd, 2020

News

Using AI and data to manage business risk better

By Diane 18 hours ago

In June 2020, when the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) issued updated guidance on how to evaluate corporate compliance programs, it came with a clear mandate to companies: Compliance programs must use robust technology and data analytics to assess their own actions and those of any third parties they do business with, from the point of engagement onward. At the very least, companies are expected to be able to explain the rationale for using third parties, whether they have relationships with foreign officials, and any potential risks to their reputation.

This is a compliance game-changer. Historically, organizations could argue that they simply did not have the information available to identify potential compliance dissonance across their networks: the “needle in a haystack” defense. Organizations are now expected to show that they are leveraging data and applying modern analytics to draw insights and navigate the risks across their entire business network.

Many

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For financial-services firms, inter-industry partnerships are the pathways to growth

By Diane 2 days ago

All eyes were on Goldman Sachs and Apple in March 2019, when they together announced the Apple Card, a credit vehicle for Apple’s proprietary payment service, Apple Pay. The Silicon Valley crowd liked that the product centered on an iPhone app that lets users track and sort spending in near real time, with security and other features managed by swipes and the push of virtual buttons. The card also deepened Apple’s financial-services (FS) play in the US$1.35 trillion consumer-facing tech product space, and it posed a legitimate threat to incumbents. The banking industry saw an enormous opportunity in the deal. Within just a few months, Goldman Sachs had extended $736 million in credit, in the form of outstanding loan balances, to Apple cardholders.

And for Goldman Sachs, the Apple partnership is only the beginning. The bank, not Apple, built the guts of the app: the systems for approving customers, setting

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The glue we need to fix a fractured world

By Diane 3 days ago

Jamil Zaki’s The War for Kindness wasn’t always a war. When the Stanford University psychology professor started writing his acclaimed book, which asserts that empathy is a skill that can be built, it was called Choosing Empathy. But then something happened that made the choice seem much more difficult than simply reaching for the top shelf of available emotional capacities.

In 2016, when Donald Trump stunned the world by winning the U.S. presidential election, he exposed deep, acrimonious, and seemingly unbridgeable chasms among people. The election was, at the time, the culmination of a series of such divisive events around the world. By 2016, the Syrian refugee crisis was at its height, with nations arguing over whether to tighten borders. The U.K. had voted to leave the European Union in 2016. And tens of thousands had perished in hate- and terror-driven attacks around the world, including in France; at

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The little engine that could

By Diane 4 days ago

Technology takes all of us for a ride sooner or later. The question is, to where?

In The Magnificent Ambersons, a 1918 novel, the car is author Booth Tarkington’s chosen vehicle for exploring the transformations wrought by technology (of which he was none too fond) and the hazards of standing in their way. The book is a joy to read, for a tragedy. It bristles with ironic wit and insight even as it reveals the terrible price of believing, in a modern market economy, that you can skate by on who you are rather than seeking rewards for what you can do.

Business readers in particular will recognize a host of themes that still bedevil us, including the revolutionary nature of innovation and the environmental costs of affluence. Most dangerous of all, in Tarkington’s view, is affluence itself, which breeds a fatal complacency in the family — frozen in

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An appetite for innovation

By Diane 7 days ago

The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation Insights from the Frontiers of Food

by Vaughn Tan, Columbia University Press, 2020

If you’re a foodie, the research that Vaughn Tan undertook to write The Uncertainty Mindset will strike you as a dream gig. The assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London’s School of Management spent much of the past decade studying — and embedded within — the culinary R&D teams associated with a handful of the world’s top purveyors of high-end cuisine, including José Andrés’s ThinkFoodGroup, Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine, Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck, René Redzepi’s Noma, and “Amaja” (a pseudonym Tan uses for a restaurant that sounds a lot like Poul Andrias Ziska’s Koks). Aside from the good eats, Tan came away from his research with unconventional ideas for structuring and stimulating innovation teams.

The innovation challenge facing these rarefied culinary organizations is daunting; the customer expectations of an

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Uncertainty on the menu

By Diane 7 days ago

The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation Insights from the Frontiers of Food

by Vaughn Tan, Columbia University Press, 2020

If you’re a foodie, the research that Vaughn Tan undertook to write The Uncertainty Mindset will strike you as a dream gig. The assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London’s School of Management spent much of the past decade studying — and embedded within — the culinary R&D teams associated with a handful of the world’s top purveyors of high-end cuisine, including José Andrés’s ThinkFoodGroup, Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine, Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck, René Redzepi’s Noma, and “Amaja” (a pseudonym Tan uses for a restaurant that sounds a lot like Poul Andrias Ziska’s Koks). Aside from the good eats, Tan came away from his research with unconventional ideas for structuring and stimulating innovation teams.

The innovation challenge facing these rarefied culinary organizations is daunting; the customer expectations of an

… Read more