Giuseppe Stigliano: “The first one is understanding your customer. Professor Kotler wrote a lot about the fact that marketing is not only about promotion. Rather, marketing is needed to simplify the relationship between supply and demand. Ideally, marketing is a way to fine-tune the supply so that it can meet the demand. Hopefully, this is also a good way to reduce waste if the fine-tuning is correct. The starting point is understanding the customer. We have plenty of data available today, but that access provides a great opportunity, as well as a potential challenge. Assuming that you are an established player, the moment you decide to bypass your former business partners’ retailers, or even the B2B partners that you have along the value chain, you incur any number of challenges…It was originally one channel, one company—a store, for example. Then we moved into multichannel, and now we’re moving from multichannel as well. Next is omnichannel, which is to make sure that all the channels embrace the brand and deliver value in the same way. But omnichannel is still facing the paradox of choice. There are so many ways to move. So we are now moving to something called optichanneling, where we don’t want a consumer to switch endlessly into all the channels that we offer. We want to optimize how that consumer chooses the optimum way to get to what she or he wants to solve the problem.”
Scott Keller: “If you say to us, “What is the role of a CEO?,” we’re now crystal clear on what that is. We would say the irreducible core of the role consists of six things you will need to do: set the direction, align your organization on that direction, mobilize your leaders to deliver on that direction, work with your board, connect with a group of stakeholders, manage your personal effectiveness.”
NYTimes: “Reddit is a gem of the internet, and a trusted source of news and entertainment for millions of people. It’s one of the last big platforms that feel unmistakably human — messy and rough around the edges, sure, but a place where real people gather to talk about real things, unmediated by algorithms and largely free of mindless engagement bait. Many people, me included, have gotten in the habit of appending “Reddit.com” to our Google searches, to ensure we actually get something useful. There are a lot of lessons in Reddit’s turnaround. But one of the clearest is that content moderation — the messy business of deciding what users are and aren’t allowed to post on social media, and enforcing those rules day to day — actually works.”
FT: “One hundred years ago…, Edward Leffler, a former door-to-door salesman of pots and pans, revolutionised financial markets. His invention, the open-ended mutual fund, allowed retail customers to buy into a diversified portfolio of stocks and be confident that they would get a fair value when they wanted their money back. Leffler’s innovation gave lower and middle class people an ownership stake in American capitalism. It also spawned financial titans like Fidelity and Vanguard and thousands of smaller competitors that together employ hundreds of thousands of people. Mutual funds manage nearly $20tn in US assets and about $63tn worldwide, including everything from stakes in fledgling tech start-ups to government bonds. More than half of all American households and 116mn of the country’s 333mn residents hold shares in at least one mutual fund. “The mutual fund has democratised investment. It has made investing accessible to the average person in an incredibly durable way,” says Jody Jonsson, vice-chair of Capital Group, the world’s largest active fund manager.”
Economist: “Internal mobility is central to the country’s development. Internal migrants are an important pillar of urban economies. Big cities pull in professionals from across the country. Lower-skilled migrants work on construction sites, guard gates and clean houses. The money they send home brings relief to areas that desperately need it. Yet given enormous income disparities between Indian regions, the number of Indians who migrate is small by comparison with other large and unequal countries such as China. The country could be much richer if more did so.”
