Drawdown is a New York Times Bestseller and you can see why. The book, by a large team led by Paul Hawken, has a profusion of detail on ways that the impacts of climate change can be alleviated and ultimately reversed. It provides a guide to drawdown solutions. The book gives an optimistic view of…
Must Firms Maximize Shareholder Value?
What is the purpose of a firm? Given we have so many firms and business schools are such a sizable chunk of many universities, you might think that we all agree what firms are for. You would be wrong. There is a surprising amount of disagreement as to the purpose of firms. What are they…
People Aren’t Getting Worse
Ever since I was in secondary school (high school in US terms) I have thought it is bizarre that people think that humans are getting worse. Adam Mastroianni and Dan Gilbert wrote a paper in Nature on this phenomenon which they call The Illusion of Moral Decline. In many ways, they have written the paper…
Triple Bottom Line
John Elkington gave us the idea of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) in 1994. In 2018 he proposed that the idea be recalled for a retooling. Things hadn’t worked out as he hoped. The Triple Bottom Line The idea behind the Triple Bottom Line is simple. Rather than fixating on financial performance alone, the bottom…
Stakeholder Management As A Threat
For my second and final post on Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke Inc. I want to discuss his view of stakeholder management. Especially, the idea of stakeholder management as a threat (specifically to democracy). Stakeholder Management And Woke As I mentioned in a prior post part of the challenge with definitions is that people aren’t clear what…
Woke As A Magical Term
It is (nearly) always useful to read books that you don’t expect to agree with. Woke Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy is one of those. (Plus buying it means Amazon is now sending me lots of different recommendations for books by Ron DeSantis etc… which is a fun change). Ramaswamy is running in the Republican primary…
Clear Data-Driven Stories
Scott Galloway has a book on where the US is currently. He provides a useful example of clear data-driven stories. A Famous Marketing Professor Galloway is a marketing professor and as such I am naturally supportive. It is great that he is famous and appears in the media so much. I’m all for it. We…
Environmental Impact Equation
Ray Anderson is a bit of a legend in sustainable business circles. He was from Georgia and even played American football for Georgia Tech to which he later bequeathed a Center in Sustainable Business. Today I’ll look at his book — Mid-Course Correction, and highlight the way he saw the role of technology in an…
Random Forests and Machine Learning
Scott Hartshorn has some useful accessible advice on all things analytics. Today I’ll look at his advice on random forests and machine learning. Machine Learning He starts by giving us a clear intuitive, rather than a formal, view of what machine learning (ML) is. He says that at their heart a lot of different ML…
Competitive Advantage And Social Purpose
How should firms approach competing using their commitment to social and environmental purpose? This was the challenge tackled by Omar Rodríguez-Vilá and Sundar Bharadwaj in their 2017 article published in the Harvard Business Review. (Sundar is a colleague of mine at the University of Georgia). The approach they outline seeks to show a clear way…
