TRIUM Connects

What does it mean to teach ‘leadership’?  For most of human history, education and leadership formation were essentially the same thing. Only future leaders were formally educated. To educate someone was to form them - morally, civically, intellectually - for the responsibility of leading others. The classical traditions, whether Aristotelian, Stoic, or Confucian, did not aim to develop...

AI is becoming ubiquitous in our lives. It shapes how we work, play, interact, create, and even manage our health—and this is only the beginning. To understand where we are and where we might go, we first need to understand how we got here. By tracing the evolving nature of machine intelligence, we can appreciate how today’s AI differs from its past and how it is likely to evolve. With that in min...

At the heart of every organization lies a web of relationships: individual performance is shaped by not only a person’s inherent characteristics, but also by their interactions with others within teams, and their teams’ interactions with other teams across the system. Within such a complex structure, how can we know how much of ‘deviant behavior’ can be explained by poor leadership? What kind...

How can we understand the decline of establishment political parties and the rise of new, successful challengers in Europe? Why are these new challengers predominantly right wing nationalist parties? How does their rise compare to the MAGA movement in the US? How is this new political landscape creating even greater challenges to attempts to solve cross-border problems with supranational coop...

The policies in the first 100 days of the Trump administration have resulted in an extraordinary time of uncertainty and change in the way the global economy works and how it will function in the future.  The shock at the speed and scope of the undermining of the current system regulating global trade is real.  When we feel disorientated by our current experience of chaos, it i...

We are all born, become toddlers, teenagers, adults, mid-aged, late middle aged, and eventually die. Do company’s follow this same pattern? If so, can we use that pattern to better predict what they will do and compare that to what they should do at different stages of their life cycles? My guest for this episode is Aswath Damodaran. Aswath is a Professor of Finance at the Stern School o...

My guest for this episode of Fawaz Gerges of the London School of Economics where he is the Emirates Professorship in Contemporary Middle East Studies. Fawaz earned his doctorate at Oxford and has taught there, as well as at Harvard and Columbia. He has been a research scholar at Princeton and is the author of 10 books on the Middle East and his articles and editorials have appeared in ...

Across the world, the rise of various forms of authoritarianism and ethno-nationalism seems to be on an ever upward trend. This creates huge uncertainties across multiple dimensions – personal, cultural, political, and not least of which in challenges business leaders face as they attempt to navigate across this uncertainty.  All of this turmoil is, according to Larry Kramer - the Vice C...

Once in a while you come across a person who embodies, in their thoughts and deeds, a kind of archetype or ideal form of a role – the great artist, the wise philosopher, the genius physicist. Hervé Coyco, for me, is the archetype of the best of business leaders. In our conversation he shares some of the wisdom, humility and practices which have made him such a successful leader and impressive huma...

My guest for this episode is Laurence Lehmann-Ortega. Laurence is one of the world’s leading experts on how existing firms can create innovative new business models. In this episode we discuss the newest edition of her book, Re(Inventing) your Business Model: The Odyssey 3.14 Approach, co-authored with Helene Musikas and Jean March Schoettl. The book has also been adapted into a MOO...

I am delighted to be joined by Suzy Welch for this episode. Suzy has had an amazing career! After graduating from Harvard, she became a crime beat reporter for the Miami Herald but after a short time was re-assigned to the business section – a change which would set the stage for the rest of her career. She then left journalism and went back to Harvard for her MBA. After graduating with honou...

Occasionally you read a book that changes the way you think about a topic or a place.  The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism by Keyu Jin is just such a book and it was great to have her join me on TRIUM Connects. We discuss the consequences (both intended an unintended) of the one child policy, the combination of strong political centralisation and economic decentralisa...

I am guessing that most of you have heard about Chinese firms and government’s large involvement and investment in Africa. For example, as part of a strategy to secure the resources needed to play a leading role in the economy of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, China has purchased mining rights, mined, and built refineries for rare earth elements in multiple locations in...

In 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis, 25 US banks failed. Their combined asset value was equal to $526 billion (adjusted for inflation). In the first 5 months of 2023, three banks have failed with a total asset value of $532 billion. Let that sink in – we are in uncharted territory. What is happening and why? Why do we see a kind of slow-motion contagion effect?&nbs...

Upwards Influence – The Art and Science of Being Heard Over the last several decades, more and more leadership research has highlighted the need for leaders to create an environment where disparate and diverse opinions and approaches are elicited and incorporated into decision making. If leaders can manage that, they can more easily avoid premature consensus and narrative fallacies, thereby i...

Explanations of individual’s political affiliations which do not take non-material into account are fatally flawed. We simply cannot explain or predict people’s political behaviour without thinking about how support for individuals/parties are affected by, and shape people’s identities, felt exclusion/inclusion, legitimacy, and recognition. However, when it comes to trying to explain how stat...

Search Amazon for the word ‘innovation’ in its ‘Business, Finance & Accounting’ book section, and you will find more than 60,000 volumes. The trick is finding stuff worth reading in this deep and wide ocean of material. The new book, Ideaflow: Why Creative Businesses Win, by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn is just such a book. I welcomed Jeremy to this episode of TRIUM Connects t...

We have all become aware how important data is as everything becomes more digitalised. Data is everywhere – nearly our every moment and movement is recorded and stored. Connected devices offer more and more convenience. Our cars exchange information with our phones, which exchange information with our smart houses, which exchange information with our home computers,… and on and on. Without the dig...

We are at the start of a time when humans will be able to program cells and organisms in analogous ways to which we now program computers. Our technology and understanding of the basic structures of life, augmented by computer simulations driven by AI, are driving breakthrough innovations at an ever-increasing rate. What will this mean for us all? It could mean the end of most diseases a...

What does being a fabulously successful, early stage VC investor have in common with being a world class CEO? The answer, according to Jihoon Rim , my guest for this episode, is the ability to select the right people and then, largely get out of their way and let them do their jobs. Jihoon, after a stint at Softbank, founded his own VC firm – Kcube Ventures – in 2012 with an initial fund of USD 10...

Over the last 10-20 years we have seen the rise and rise of populist and nationalist movements in democracies across the world. This, in part, reflects a growing dissatisfaction with the state of our democratic institutions. Many people just don’t believe that democracy delivers for them. My guest for this episode is Professor Alberto Alemanno. To combat the ever-increasing attracti...

I am joined in this episode by Professor Mick Cox of the LSE to discuss the unfolding tragic war in Ukraine. How do we possibly make sense of what is happening? What kind of end can we imagine when losing is not an option for anyone? What does winning or losing even mean in this situation? Is this the end the age of international order, growing prosperity, and relative peace cr...

I am joined in this episode by Professor Vasant Dhar where we talk about why social media platforms should be regulated and how we would go about doing so. Vasant argues that we have failed to install any rules of the game when it comes to holding platforms responsible for their demonstratable contribution to social ills. This, according to Vasant, leads to some truly egregious gaps in o...

Increasingly, company boards are expected to incorporate environmental, social and governance issues into their strategic choices and performance criteria. How, exactly, should they do this? One approach is to integrate the entire costs/benefits of the firm’s activities, including those which are currently unpaid-for externalities, into its balance sheet. But is that really possible...

How should we view the current crisis in our supply chains? Did the external shock of COVID create severe, but relatively temporary problems? If so, then we should, slowly but surely, see a return to how things were before, with ‘just in time’ principles driving supply chain design and execution. Or, has the crisis revealed fundamental structural weaknesses in our pre-COVID practice...