WSJ: “Mytheresa sells $8,600 feather-trimmed Prada dresses and $8,400 Bottega Veneta handbags online. Roughly 40% of its sales come from less than 4% of its customers, and some of them shop with Mytheresa every week. Chief Executive Michael Kliger figured out how to sell luxury goods online even as rivals flamed out. His secret: an obsessive focus on big spenders. Since becoming CEO in 2015, Kliger has prioritized the top shoppers, who spend upward of $12,000 a year on average with Mytheresa. The company’s algorithms identify these sought-after fashionistas from their first purchase, based on what they buy, the credit card and digital device they use, and the time of day they shop. Then, Mytheresa showers them with perks like invitations to in-person special events, such as a private viewing of a New York City Ballet rehearsal. Exclusive collections from a tightly curated set of designers keep them coming back.”
SAP CEO Christian Klein: “When I’m running in such IT projects and I’m only seeing IT people around the table, they are needed, but in order to do what I just described, and in order to transform a business model, you need a business at the table. You need to think through in the digital world, how will this company sell? How we will service the customer? How do you want a price? How do you want to fulfill? How do you want to deliver faster? And for that, it’s not only that we are coming with our best-of-suite and saying, “Here we are, let’s just implement it”. You need the business at the table, you need to have a change culture which comes from the top and says, “Similar to what we did, SAP or what Microsoft did or what others are doing, we are disrupting our own business module and the customer needs to be up for that”. So don’t see SAP as another IT project, we are more than infrastructure, we are more than a move to a new hyperscale environment, we are running your businesses, and you need to see this projects as a travel project and I need change management. I need the people who lead that together with IT and we come in with our tools to tell you, “You know what? We have 20,000 other customers in this industry, in your segment. Here are the best practices. Let’s benchmark your business processes against the best practices, what we are seeing”.”
John Coates: “The first thing to note is that uncertainty can indeed soften you up and make you more risk-averse. It does so by triggering a powerful reaction known as “the stress response”. Stress is commonly misunderstood as psychological, being freaked out because something nasty might happen. But the stress response is physical, a body-wide preparation for impending movement. Got that? When waiting for a tennis serve you engage the stress response. Your muscles need fuel, so your stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, withdraw glucose and free fatty acids from storage tanks in your liver, muscles and fat cells. You need to deliver this fuel throughout your body, so your heart beats faster. You need oxygen to burn the fuel so your breathing speeds up.”
Art Laffer: “Every single time we’ve raised tax rates on the top 1% of income earners, every single time, the economy has underperformed. Every single time we’ve raised tax rates on the top 1%, tax revenues from the top 1% of income earners goes down. Every time we’ve cut tax rates on the rich, the economy has outperformed.”
Bloomberg: “The battle for AI supremacy now looks less like a foregone conclusion for Silicon Valley incumbents, and more like the start of a broader, healthier market. The next chapter in AI’s evolution is being shaped in Shenzhen and Beijing as much as it is in San Francisco and Seattle. For consumers and businesses around the world, more international competition promises affordable AI, greater transparency and innovation that doesn’t only address the priorities of the Silicon Valley elite. There will likely be profound geopolitical consequences, too. If Chinese open-source models power more of the world’s services, that creates a potentially disturbing path of influence by the Chinese Communist Party, and could lead to more protectionist policies from Western governments. It could also herald a more vibrant international market that belies the trade tensions now hampering most other industries. Because China’s AI systems are free, they are, oddly enough, insulated from the current trade war. There are no cross-border prices that high tariffs can affect. This means that even as China’s physical exports get gummed up in trade tensions, its AI can spread far and wide to become one of the country’s most successful (and influential) exports.”
