Why we need a new macroeconomic paradigm | vox - Research-based. Do the US and Europe risk repeating Japan’s lost decade? This column warns that if the US or European financial clean-ups falter, they will be vulnerable to recurring financial crises. It argues that macroeconomic models should not treat finance as an innocuous veil and calls for a new approach that places financial intermediaries at the centre of its models. The policies being debated in the US and Europe today are almost identical to those that played out in Japan a decade or so ago.
Japan experienced the collapse of its colossal property bubble in 1990 and then a series of crises as major banks and securities companies were overwhelmed by rapidly rising non-performing debts. The conventional wisdom among economists and politicians throughout the 1990s was that massive public expenditure and extraordinary monetary easing would give the necessary boost to market sentiments and prompt an economic recovery. Public opinion in the US and Europe today seems to be the same. Chari, V. Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan: 'There Is No Substitute for E. When the United Arab Emirates (UAE) became a nation in the early 1970s, there were few signs of the Islamic Golden Age that put the Middle East at the global forefront of education and intellectual innovation hundreds of years earlier. The small nation of just a few million Emiratis, in fact, had neither a formal education system nor a university to call its own. Flash forward to today, however, and the UAE has a primary and secondary school system for both boys and girls, and new private and public universities have sprung up across the emirates.
An edited transcript of the conversation follows. Knowledge@Wharton: Sheikh Nahayan, thank you so much for joining us today. Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan: It’s a pleasure to be with you. Knowledge@Wharton: You have taken such a vital leadership role in education initiatives such as the Festival of Thinkers and Education Without Borders. Sheikh Nahayan: Thank you. I think it is only through education that we can eradicate poverty. Globalization of Technology Ventures: Lessons from Israel - Know. Technology is universal, and technology markets are relatively culture-insensitive.
Still, the fact remains that surprisingly few high-tech startups that were conceived outside the U.S. or the world’s primary technology markets have evolved into global companies. Why is that so? In this opinion piece, Gideon Tolkowsky, principal of Israel-based BME Capital Management, who has been involved in venture capital in the U.S. and Israel for more than 25 years, offers some lessons from Israeli high-tech startups. Globalization has become a cliché, and in no other field of business has it become more worn out than in technology.
Several yardsticks can be used to measure the so-called global presence of a technology company. How can a country with a population of a little more than seven million — approximately the population of New Jersey — located 9,000 km from the U.S. — breed dozens of technology companies that have succeeded in going international? Globalize or Go Bust It Begins with a Plan. Technological Evolution Stirs a Publishing Revolution - Knowledg. For publishing, 2009 may go down as the year of the machine. Consider Amazon’s electronic-book reader, Kindle. Though the first version launched in late 2007, a lighter, faster, cheaper version went on sale this spring. And while the online-only retailer doesn’t release sales figures for the reader itself, its cultural impact was clear by late July, when USA Today announced it would include Kindle editions in its popular weekly list of best-selling books. With slightly less fanfare, 2009 has also seen the emergence of the Espresso book machine, which will make its New York bookstore debut this fall, having already popped up on campuses in several states.
Where Kindle offers consumers a chance to buy some 350,000 books at the touch of a finger — and then read them electronically — the Espresso allows them to print a professional-looking paperback book in about the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. Different Values But just how long a time is open to debate. New Gatekeepers. The Coming 'Wall' of Refinancings: A Trial for Private Equity Fi. Private equity faces a difficult environment as credit markets try to absorb maturing debt from large leveraged buyouts. Panelists at the 2009 Wharton Private Equity & Venture Capital Conference, “Multiplicity Without Rhythm: Investing in Chaotic Markets,” said financial sponsors are scrambling to prepare for the refinancings that will start coming onto markets in 2012. According to panelists who took part in a discussion titled, “Leveraged Buyouts: Strategies in Times of Turmoil,” firms are focusing hard on portfolio company operations, exploring new positions in the capital structure and considering strategic, synergistic transactions.
Jack Daly, managing director of Goldman Sachs’ principal investment area, put the crisis in historical perspective, noting that 2007 and 2008 represent sharply different markets. In 2007, the market was robust, with easy access to credit, liberal loan covenants, and the possibility of a $100 billion buyout. By the end of 2008, everything was different. Why Few Executives Are Skillful Managers - Gill Corkindale - Har. By Gill Corkindale | 12:43 PM August 19, 2009 I work with senior executives from all over the world with remarkably diverse industries, backgrounds, and cultures, yet it’s always a surprise to realise that their development needs are very similar. How can it be that a French CFO of a luxury goods company has the same management problems as a Kuwaiti operations manager?
Or that a Japanese quality assurance manager has to deal with the same people issues as a German investment banker? The answer is partly due to the fact that there is a fundamental human psychology and partly because globalisation has narrowed the gulf between cultures. There are three main reasons. With these thoughts in mind, I offer my clients a short and simple management development plan to get them going. Rules: Commit to the plan for six months. Development Areas: 1. Remember that however talented you are, your career is likely to have stalled had your boss not trusted you with a challenging piece of work. 2. 3. 4. Should Your Organization "Go Google"? - Gina Trapani - HarvardBu. By Gina Trapani | 6:18 PM August 18, 2009 This month Google’s running a billboard ad campaign (the only kind they do) in Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco encouraging businesses to switch to Google Apps from Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange.
They call the transition “going Google” and even offer a convincing calculator which shows you how much money your organization can save by outsourcing your IT needs to Google. Consider these impressive numbers pitting Google Apps Premier subscriptions (at $50 per user) against Microsoft Exchange 2007. With an IT Director’s time priced at $69/hour and the hardware and software required for 100 users, according to GOOG, “going Google” costs $3,300 a year, compared to $34,000 annually for Microsoft Exchange. For a small company, that’s a significant savings of $30,000 annually, or over $100k in three years.
Plug in the numbers that match your organization here (click on the “Save Money” tab). Sounds good, doesn’t it? Observations from a Student Leadership Summit - Conversation Sta. By Elizabeth Haas Edersheim | 11:32 AM August 17, 2009 Last week I had the opportunity to participate in the Student Leadership Summit, the inaugural event of the Frances Hesselbein Global Academy for Student Leadership and Civic Engagement, at the University of Pittsburgh. The academy’s mission is to inspire, develop, and reward accomplished student leaders to meet the challenges of tomorrow. We spent four days engaged in intense learning, discussion, and fun with 44 leaders of tomorrow–4 of whom are my mentees. The summit was fantastic (thank you, Frances).
Some observations: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Elizabeth Haas Edersheim conducts case-study-based research on critical leadership issues — often in collaboration with corporations and speaks frequently at management events. Shai Agassi, Israel's Homegrown Electric Car Pioneer: On the Roa. If there’s a poster child for Israel’s entrepreneurial spirit, start-up Better Place is one strong candidate. Since launching the company in 2007, Shai Agassi – a 41-year-old Israeli entrepreneur and former executive of software giant SAP – has been shaking up the auto industry with his vision for mass adoption of zero-emission vehicles powered by electricity from renewable sources.
Starting off with $200 million of seed money, Better Place has since been setting up networks of service stations for electric cars, helping to wean drivers from their environmentally unfriendly gas guzzlers. John Paul MacDuffie, a professor of management at Wharton and co-director of the International Motor Vehicle Program, joined Knowledge@Wharton to interview Agassi from the company’s headquarters in California about what it takes to develop an oil-independent future. An edited transcript of the conversation appears below: Shai Agassi: I was [at] the Young Global Leaders Forum. Agassi: It wasn’t easy. . …. Adding Layers of Skills to a Science Background - The New York T. The Corporate Lab as Ringmaster. Dear DoD, the Web Itself is Social. A few weeks ago, Noah Shachtman of Wired’s Danger Room blog wrote about how the, “U.S. military is strongly considering a near-total ban on Twitter, Facebook, and all other social networking sites throughout the Department of Defense.”
According to Wired, the DoD believes that social networks, “make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users.” In April of this year, Mark Drapeau and Linton Wells II (previously the acting CIO of the DoD) published a thirty-five page report titled Social Software and National Security: An Initial Net Assessment which looked at the interplay between social software and national security. It’s my belief that even if the DoD tried to block all access to social networking sites it would be a never ending and ultimately unsuccessful battle as social is becoming a core component of the web itself. A bestiary of algorithmic trading strategies « Locklin on scienc. One of the things which confronted me when I got interested in quantitative finance is the varieties of different kinds of quant. Now I realize this is pretty simple. Quants come in three basic varieties. Structurers: people who price complex financial instruments.Risk managers people who manage portfolio riskQuant traders people who use statistics to make money by buying and selling It took me quite a while to figure this out.
I don’t know why people haven’t bothered to state this taxonomy of quant jobs. I suspect it’s because most quants are structurers. Since I’m not presently employed as a quant trader, I don’t mind talking about it a little bit. To make money as a trader, assuming your motivation is to make a profit, you need to buy low and sell high. Liquidity peddlers. My categories are somewhat arbitrary, just as my aforementioned categories of quant are somewhat arbitrary. Which of these are high frequency? What is a “predatory algorithm?” Like this: Like Loading... Where Yahoo Leaves Google in the Dust. Why Jeremiah Owyang Is Leaving Forrester Research.
Jeremiah Owyang knows what he wants and he knows how to get it, fast. Just short of two years after joining Forrester, the second biggest professional analyst firm in the US, Owyang announced yesterday that he's decided to leave. From working in the marketing department of Hitachi Data Systems to joining business podcast network startup Podtech to becoming the first blogger to be hired as an analyst - Owyang's last five years have been a model of professional advancement through social media.
He hasn't disclosed what he's going to do next yet, but his so-far brief career as probably the most social-media savvy member of the relatively conservative analyst industry offers a rich snapshot of how this important part of the business world is changing. Owyang has already played a big role in changing it. Jeremiah Owyang wasn't just any analyst. How The Analyst Industry Works If you're not familiar with how the analyst industry works, here's a very short summary.
How Jeremiah Owyang Works. The Truth: What’s Really Going On With Apple, Google, AT&T And T. Apple has responded to the FCC’s request for information around its rejection of various Google and third party iPhone applications for the iPhone. In short, Apple denies that they rejected the Google Voice application, but they go into great detail about how the Google Voice application hurts “the iPhone’s distinctive user experience.” All of those statements are either untrue, or misleading, or both.
The first part of Apple’s argument, that they never rejected the application, is “a total lie,” according to many sources with knowledge of the Google Voice application process. The second part of Apple’s argument, that the Google Voice application hurts the iPhone’s distinctive user experience, is seriously misleading. I know this because I’ve become intimately familiar with the Google Voice service and applications over the last few months. See here, here, here and here, for example. Here’s the key language from Apple’s letter, with my comments: Reality: Not true and misleading.
Stimulus 2.0: It’s The Startups, Stupid. Editor’s note: The guest post below was written by Reid Hoffman, CEO and Founder of LinkedIn. Reid has some strong opinions about how startups can help right the economy, and he offers some suggestions below. (You can also catch him tonight on Charlie Rose, or check out our interview we did with him at Davos). Reid is an investor in over 60 web ventures including Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, FunnyOrDie, Ning, Last.fm, Six Apart and Technorati. While at Davos this year, the conversation spurred a lot of thought about how we can navigate through the economic crisis.
Yesterday, I shared a few of these thoughts in a Washington Post op-ed to offer a Silicon Valley perspective to lawmakers. I believe the real fix for the economy is massive entrepreneurship and innovation to create new jobs through new products and services. Here are a few of my proposals: 1. Why? 2. This is a country founded on immigration. 3. Vers une nouvelle architecture? - Tendances IT.