McKinsey: “Create a CEO-led leadership factory—at industrial speed and scale. Building a leadership factory, which involves taking a systematic approach to identifying, nurturing, and empowering future leaders, is a group activity. But its lessons are more likely to stick, and growth opportunities are more likely to emerge, when CEOs, working closely with their leadership teams, take an active, hands-on role in building the factory. To begin creating a leadership factory, CEOs and their teams should focus on the following critical actions and support them with enabling technologies and detailed metrics to ensure that leadership development efforts are having the intended impact…Take the pen and outline the traits and attributes you want future leaders to have.”
BCG (newsletter): “Building a Dynamic Revenue Model. You can’t forecast what you do not understand. By developing a digital, continuously updated driver tree, you can analytically capture and monitor key revenue factors, margins, costs, and forward-looking indicators. This work will enable faster, smarter responses to market changes…To keep your planning nimble, integrate a rolling forecast that continuously tracks forward-looking indicators and other variables. If an indicator flags a move to the lower bound of the base case forecast, you can reduce variable costs rather than shrinking operating margins. If an indicator suggests you will exceed the base case, you can expand margins. These indicators can also help CEOs pivot if an alternative scenario is poised to displace the base case.”
Economist: “Over time market forces should encourage more companies to make serious use of AI. As with previous new technologies, such as the tractor and the personal computer, innovative firms ought to outcompete the holdouts and eventually put them out of business. Yet this process will take a while—too long, perhaps, for the big AI companies, which need to make huge profits on their investments in data centres. The irony of labour-saving automation is that people often stand in the way.”
The Verge: “Delta Air Lines is leaning into dynamic ticket pricing that uses artificial intelligence to individually determine the highest fee you’d willingly pay for flights, according to comments Fortune spotted in the company’s latest earnings call. Following a limited test of the technology last year, Delta is planning to shift away from static ticket prices entirely after seeing “amazingly favorable” results. “We will have a price that’s available on that flight, on that time, to you, the individual,” Delta president Glen Hauenstein told investors in November, having started to test the technology on 1 percent of its ticket prices. Delta currently uses AI to influence 3 percent of its ticket prices…and is aiming to increase that to 20 percent by the end of this year. “We’re in a heavy testing phase,” said Hauenstein. “We like what we see. We like it a lot, and we’re continuing to roll it out.””
