strategy+business

For much of the past two years, our days (and many of our sleepless nights) have been filled with a desire to return to normalcy, to get back to business as usual. But the reality is that, in part due to the continuing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, in part due to the technological disruption that continually upends business models, and in part due to the force of climate change, it’s not a simple proposition to return to some status quo ante. More and more, our baseline assumption is that things have to continue to change—and rapidly. We may simply be in a mode in which the prevailing mindset is “business as unusual.” Major articles in this insight packed issue certainly speak to this new reality. In our cover story, “Reimagining…

Time and again, we’ve seen excitement build around new technologies—the rail road, electricity, the personal computer, fiber optics, e-commerce. Early investors place risky bets on seemingly oddball ideas. As a few gain traction, the money (and the hype) follows. As a market develops, large investors—venture capitalists, private equity firms, Wall Street—pile in and help scale up technology. A similar dynamic is unfolding today in climate tech. Fifteen years ago, solar power plants and electric cars were marginal players with poor business prospects. But years of successful innovation, iteration, and improvement coupled with a pervasive sense of urgency to deal with climate change have spurred an investment boom. PwC’s State of Climate Tech 2020 report found that in 2013, a mere US$418 million globally was invested by venture capital (VC) firms into…

In the spring of 2020, an Asia based fintech was blindsided by surging demand for electronic payments. As millions of customers took their transactions online at the outset of the pandemic, many for the first time, the company’s on boarding, troubleshooting, and other service functions struggled to keep up. Around the same time, my own employer, IMD business school, had to quickly migrate its executive education programs online. Professional silos tumbled down, and hierarchies, structures, and procedures were reimagined. The workforce thrived under pressure. Creating this new model required an upgrade of our interfaces with program applicants and participants to ensure an intuitive yet high-end experience. Confronted with unforeseen, pressing challenges, both organizations responded by hosting short burst, virtual collaboration modules. The fintech brought together 200 employees for a first-of-its-kind, five-day online program.…

Tariye Gbadegesin grew up in Port Harcourt, in the heart of Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta. From a young age, she contemplated the drivers of economic development. “Why was the Niger Delta so poor,” she asked herself, “when there were such large resources underpinning the region?” Gbadegesin went on to study economics at Amherst College in the United States, and then worked at the IMF. After getting her MBA at Harvard University, she returned to Nigeria, where she helped launch the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), a public–private pan-African infrastructure bank, leading its climate engagement. In March 2020, she was named CEO at ARM-Harith, a private equity fund that is a joint venture between a US$2.7 billion Nigerian nonbank financial institution and a $1 billion South African infrastructure fund. ARM-Harith has positioned itself as…

Every company fits into one of two categories: those that have suffered a serious cyber breach or those that haven’t but are worried they’ll be next. The ranks of the former and the vulnerability of the latter have grown with the pandemic. In reaction to COVID-19 responses and subsequent behavioral shifts, many organizations compressed what would have been years of digital transformation into months, potentially reshaping their cybersecurity risk profile. Cyberattacks increased globally as people migrated online, which overwhelmed already-strained IT departments and disrupted millions of new users of remote-work technology. Some organizations, faced with supply chain interruption, resorted to alternative suppliers whose suboptimal cybersecurity practices opened new avenues of attack. A company’s key stakeholders—shareholders, customers, and employees—have come to equate any security breach with a breach of trust, and building and…

Neil Young famously thumbed his nose at the commercialization of pop music in his 1988 song “This Note’s for You,” in which he declared he “don’t sing for nobody / Makes me look like a joke.” But the legendary singer-songwriter appeared to change his tune last January when he sold a 50% interest in his 1,180-song catalog to Hipgnosis Songs Fund. Within months of the deal, the UK-based music IP-investment and song management company had licensed Young’s “Old Man” for the CBS series The Equalizer and “Harvest Moon” to Netflix comedy Sex Edu cation, according to Hipgnosis’s annual report. Sellout or not, Young had impeccable timing. Producers of ads, movies, TV, and Broadway and Las Vegas shows, as well as countless products, games, digital streaming services, and devices, can’t get enough of old…