Cyber Risk and Changing Corporate Structure

With a growing list of CEOs losing their jobs because of cyber attacks and data breaches, it’s time for corporations to change how they operate. Escalating cyber risks necessitate two core corporate structural changes. First, the role of the CIO should be elevated, reporting directly into the CEO and gaining corporate board visibility. Secondly, corporate […]

Trendcasting Artificial Intelligence

To truly understand Artificial Intelligence, we have to understand where we are assigning it too much potential and where we aren’t giving it enough credit. Artificial intelligence or AI for short, began as a field of study in the 1950s, not long after the introduction of the first digital computer in 1942. In these early […]

What Apple Really Accomplished with the iPhone

Last week was the iPhone’s 10th anniversary and there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of articles written articulating how the iPhone changed everything. Most narratives build off the now famous line in Steve Job’s iPhone keynote: …today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second […]

I Hope You Will Be Treated Unfairly…

Last month Chief Justice gave the commencement speech at Cardigan Mountain School, an independent junior boarding school in New Hampshire for boys in grades 6th through 9th. The entire 12 minute speech was posted to YouTube and I’ve included the video below. The entire talk is worth a quick listen. As someone who writes physical letters each […]

A Purposeful Life in a Land of Robots

Bill Gates writes on Yuval Noah Hattari’s most recent book Homo Deus: I am more interested in what you might call the purpose problem. Assume we maintain control [of robots and artificial intelligence]. What if we solved big problems like hunger and disease, and the world kept getting more peaceful: What purpose would humans have […]

Voice-first Commerce

The idea of voice-first commerce is nothing new but it’s about to evolve in meaningful ways.  We’ve long engaged in voice-first commercial transactions. Drive-through restaurants were build around voice-first  commerce. While there is some debate on who was first, In-N-Out Burger’s first restaurant, which opened in Baldwin Park, California in 1948, helped define the modern drive-through […]

A Few Thoughts on the Labor Market

With the April jobs report out last Friday there are a number of characteristics of the current labor market worth noting. Most of the headlines last week focused on strong than expected employment gains and a decline in the unemployment rate that takes it down to 4.4 percent – the lowest since May 2007. The unemployment rate […]

Has Silicon Valley Cornered the Talent Market for Self-Driving Vehicles? 

Porsche announced today they would be opening an office in Silicon Valley. According to the press release, the mandate of the office, which will initially be about 100 staff, is to:  recognize digitalization strategies and trends in the U.S. market more quickly and to be able to develop and test solutions for Porsche – making its […]