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Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! Im Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Glenn Fogel joined dot-com darling Priceline in early 2000, a year after the name your price travel sites blockbuster initial public offering (IPO). “I joined one week before the Nasdaq peaked, Fogel recalls. Within a year of his arrival, the stock had cratered to $6 a share. By March 2002, the Nasdaq, a proxy for the burgeoning e-commerce and tech infrastructure companies that went public, plunged 77% from its March 2020 highs. Quips Fogel: At the time, my mother was wondering whether I still had a job. Today, Fogel is CEO and president of Booking Holdingsparent of Priceline, KAYAK, Booking.com, OpenTable, and other brands. His experience navigating the dotcom bubble (more on that in a moment) affords a compelling perch from which to observe the current generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) boom. He sees parallels in the gold-rush mentality of both booms: Theres lots of investments, lots of new companies, he says. Many of them will not make it. Many investors will lose money. Corporate investment in AI reached $252.3 billion, and private investment in gen AI reached $33.9 billion in 2024, according to data compiled by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered artificial intelligence. The key difference between the dotcom bubble and now? I would say in terms of the possibility for human society, I think the possible transformations from gen AI are so much greater than what was possible from the [startups of] the nineties, he says. Fogel points to breakthroughs like Googles AlphaFold model, which decoded protein folding and could accelerate drug discovery. Every area really of our society can be greatly improved by using gen AI, he says. Thats the thing thats so exciting. Happy travelers In travel, the stakes may not be as high, but the impact on daily life could be profound. Maybe were not going to save a lot of lives the way that the healthcare industry is going to be able to do, but maybe well make the experience much happier, he says. Indeed, the company is already deploying AI to reduce customer-service wait times, using gen AI chatbots that can solve problems instantly. When a human agent does handle a call, the bots generate conversation summaries and next stepswork that previously consumed significant amounts of agent time. Embracing emerging technology has been key to Booking Holdingss longevity. When predecessor company Priceline Group bought Booking.com in 2005, it acquired Bookings prowess in leveraging Googles paid search and platforms that enabled the business to rapidly test messaging to optimize conversion rates. The company subsequently bought travel search engine KAYAK in 2013 and restaurant reservation platform OpenTable in 2014. Priceline Group changed its name to Booking Holdings in 2018. The long view Travel itself is currently experiencing a boom. Despite economic uncertainty, U.S. consumers, especially those at the high-end of the market, are prioritizing travel, with airlines and hotels indicating strong demand for premium products. Indeed, at the end of October, Booking Holdings reported better-than-expected third-quarter earnings and said it continues to see steady travel demand trends in the current quarter. Having led Booking Holdings through the dotcom boom and bustas well as the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a near complete shutdown of travelFogel acknowledges that nothing goes up forever. I dont know when those bad times are going to come, but theyre going to come sometimes, he says. Still, he takes the long view: I do know, in the long run, travel is always going to increase. It is human nature . . . people wanting to travel. This time it’s different? Do you agree that the societal benefits of gen AI companies and technologies dwarf the contributions of the dotcoms? If so, what breakthroughs excite you most? Send your examples to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. Id love to share your scenarios in a future newsletter. Read more: bubble theories Why the AI-fueled stock market isnt a bubble waiting to pop There isnt an AI bubble. There are three Are we in an AI bubble?
Category:
E-Commerce
Below, Gene Ludwig shares five key insights from his new book, The Mismeasurement of America: How Outdated Government Statistics Mask the Economic Struggle of Everyday Americans. Gene is the former Comptroller of the Currency and founder of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), a nonprofit dedicated to uncovering the truths that official statistics too often obscure. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Politico, The Financial Times, and TIME. Whats the big idea? Americans keep hearing that the economy is strong. Unemployment is low. Wages are rising. Growth is steady. But for millions of families, those headlines feel like a cruel joke. The cost of rent, groceries, and healthcare keep climbing while steady, well-paid work remains out of reach. The disconnect isnt just perceptionits baked into the way we measure economic success. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Gene himselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. We are at an economic tipping point Throughout history, when governments fail to fully appreciate the realities faced by their people, it leads to crisis. The United States may be on the brink of such economic and societal unrest. The unrest that led to the French Revolution and the economic imbalances preceding the Great Depression are both cases in point. In the late eighteenth century, the oppressive economic situation facing the French people went unacknowledged by the royal family for decades. The French ruling class considered the truth about the nations fiscal crisis to be nefariousa threat to their power. Marie Antoinette, when told the peasants had no bread, replied, Let them eat cake! Whether or not the remark is literal or legend, it captures the ruling classs indifference. Soon after, the Revolution erupted, bringing turmoil and suffering to French citizens of every rank and station. The same narrative arc applied a century and a half later when the Great Depression loomed. In both instances, economic data that could have set off alarm bells was availablemore accurate figures that would have revealed the risks emergingand this perspective might have prompted action that could have softened the blow, if not avoided the crises altogether. But the data was either confusing, confounded with other contrary data, or affirmatively hidden. The effects were catastrophic. 2. A quarter of Americans are functionally unemployed The unemployment statistics our government releases monthly are misleading. If someone is looking for full-time employment but finds nothing except a single hour of work in a week, they are considered employed in the eyes of the government. For purposes of official government statistics, this one-hour employee is in the same category as someone secure in a full-time job. This logic extends to wages. Someone who works full- or part-time for a salary that falls below the poverty line (around $25,000 a year for a three-person household) is classified the same way as someone earning $1 million every month. The United States may be on the brink of such economic and societal unrest. LISEPs research team and I consider anyone in the previous two situations to be functionally unemployed. The governments most recent unemployment rate is 4.3 percent, but our research finds that 24.7 percent of American workers are functionally unemployed. 3. Pay statistics ignore part-time and unemployed job seekers The government reports on median wages every quarter. The idea behind their metric is simple and straightforward: If you line up all full-time employees in order of their weekly earnings, the person directly in the middle earns the median wage. But this statistic only considers the wages of people who are currently employed full-time, overlooking millions of part-time workers and unemployed job seekers. So, the moment a low-wage factory worker receives a pink slip, her salary is deleted from the sample altogether. The moment a farm workers seasonal employment ends, his salary is similarly deleted. What this means is the official earnings measure shows an overstated wage that doesnt reflect the reality for many low- and middle-income Americans. It can even appear to improve during economic downturns because low-wage workers are disproportionately affected by layoffs. When the economy went into near freefall during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, government-reported median earnings rose seven percent. During that same period, the percentage of functionally unemployed Americans rose from 25.7 percent to 32.8 percent. 4. Yes, your groceries are more expensive When people talk about inflation, theyre usually referring to changes in the Consumer Price Index, or CPI. The CPI tracks the prices of some 80,000 goods and services, from apples to apartments, baby formula to boats, and much more. The idea is that it gives us a single figure to measure the changing cost of a basket of all consumer products. CPI obscures the true cost of living for working-class Americans. This basket is so wide-ranging that it doesnt reflect how ordinary consumers experience cost-of-living changes, as most Americans are not buying 80,000 things. If the costs of second homes tripled while everything else in the basket stayed flat, the average American household wouldnt feel a thingthe price hike would get averaged in, but it wouldnt impact their life. But the opposite is true. Over the past two decades, the price of jewelry has risen by about 39 percent, while essential goods like bread are up by 112 percent and ground beef by 155 percent. When these items are measured alongside each other in the CPI, the relative stability of luxury items masks the inflation faced by Americans of more modest means. From 2001 to 2023, the CPI points to a 72 percent rise in living costs, yet our analysis of essential expenseshousing, food, transportation, healthcare, and other basicsshows those costs climbed 97 percent. CPI obscures the true cost of living for working-class Americans. 5. We need better statistics The headline statistics we currently employ to understand Americas economy are profoundly misleading and, unfortunately, drive policy. The CPI is pivotal in determining Social Security Benefits, as well as who qualifies for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Head Start, and Pell Grants. At least twelve states and Washington, D.C., used the CPI to determine minimum wage. Our failure to produce statistics that accurately reflect the nations economic reality makes it much harder to shape highly effective policy responsesand harder to identify the tipping point of economic and social unrest. Simply put, when you aim at the wrong target, you miss. Human naturefavors expeditious, rosy analysis rather than the rigor required to glean accuracy. Flaws in widely accepted economic statistics impede important decision-making. In many cases, those who accept economic misrepresentations do so for benign reasons: The data is too difficult to collect with sufficient regularity or precision, or the samples arent sufficiently comprehensive. Human nature favors expeditious, rosy analysis rather than the rigor required to glean accuracy, particularly when accurate numbers may be gloomy. At LISEP, weve developed alternatives to these imperfect statistics. Our True Rate of Unemployment metric includes the functionally unemployed, and our True Weekly Earnings measure includes the entire workforce. Our True Living Cost index narrows the basket of indexed consumer goods to those truly essential to the average American, while our Minimal Quality of Life index measures what it costs to not just get by but to actually have an opportunity to climb the economic ladder. Finally, our Shared Economic Prosperity measure tracks how the countrys economic growth translates into opportunity for all. For decades, policymakers and leaders have judged success or failure by distorted standards, and ordinary Americans have paid the price. Unless we change the headline statistics to reflect the reality Americans actually feel, we will keep steering down the wrong paths. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
With more than 100,000 artifacts dating back thousands of years, nearly 900,000 square feet of floor space, a site that spans more than 120 acres, and a total price tag estimated to be more than $1 billion, it’s not hyperbole to call the Grand Egyptian Museum outside Cairo, Egypt, the most significant museum project in recent decades. It’s the kind of blockbuster building that would have even the starriest of starchitects salivating at the chance to lay claim to what’s likely become one of Egypt’s most visited tourist attractions. So, in hindsight, it’s a bit unexpected that the architecture firm that won the museum’s international design competition way back in 2002 was a little-known office from Ireland with no completed projects to its name and only three people on staff. [Photo: Iwan Baan] Dublin-based Heneghan Peng Architects was virtually unknown when its concept was chosen, unanimously, out of more than 1,500 submissions as the winning design. “We hadn’t built any buildings,” says Róisín Heneghan, the firm’s cofounder. “We had one project just starting on site when we won the competition.” A lot has changed since then. The museum had an initial target opening date set for 2007, but several delays caused by the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, and the COVID pandemic kept stretching the timeline. Heneghan Peng Architects’ design is now fully built and, as of November 1, open to the public. [Photo: courtesy Grand Egyptian Museum] Thousands of years of history The Grand Egyptian Museum’s design is a sprawling spread of airplane hangar-sized concourses, sculpted landscapes, conservation workshops, and a network of underground storage facilities. The museum building itself is a cavernous space with 12 main galleries and direct views of the pyramids of Giza. A vast entrance hall sits under a tall sawtooth roof that doubles as an open-air pavilion, shading a ticketing area accented by a 30-foot-tall statue of Ramses II that’s more than 3,000 years old. On the facade, throughout the landscape, and even within the building’s structure, pyramid shapes abound. [Photo: courtesy Grand Egyptian Museum] Central to the design, according to Heneghan, is not so much the main building but the placement of the museum itself. “People were saying to us, ugh, you Westerners, you all are so fascinated by the desert, but Egypt is about the Nile,” she says. That led the architects to think first about how the museum should fit into that dichotomy. With a site selected near the famous pyramids in Giza, just on the fringe of Cairo’s urban footprint, it was clear that the museum would sit in the middle space between the desert and the Nile valley, a space that has been carved away by millennia of river flow. “There’s a 50-meter difference in level between one side of the site and the other, because that’s where the desert and the Nile met,” Heneghan says. “When you’re coming out of the city, you see the pyramids on the plateau. So what we decided was that the museum should never go above the plateau level, but that it should exist between the plateau and the Nile Valley.” [Photo: Georges & Samuel Mohsen/The GS Studio/Heneghan Peng Architects Despite grand ceilings capable of holding towering statues, the building sits low to the ground, with a fair amount of its bulk sunk into the landscape. The design of the Grand Egyptian Museum utilizes large walkways and views within the museum to give visitors a zoomed-out experience of the sprawling history represented in the galleries. [Photo: courtesy Grand Egyptian Museum] The first part of the museum visitors see after they enter is a long staircase bordered by thousands of artifacts, sarcophagi, and statuary that tracks the entire 4,000 year span of Egypt’s pharaonic history. It’s a walking crash course for the mostly international visitors to the museum before reaching the top where more discrete sections of Egypt’s ancient history are explored in more depth. Its main galleries cover themes like kings and queens, religious belief systems, and ancient Egyptian society, and the museum features an extensive collection of artifacts from the tomb of King Tutankhamun. The museum’s layout allows each of these galleries to stand on its own, but with visual connections to the others in order to tie them into a broader arc of history. [Photo: Georges & Samuel Mohsen/The GS Studio/Heneghan Peng Architects “The galleries are themed, but at the same time from different points you can see across, so you can make connections across the whole timescale,” Heneghan says. “That helped organize it. If we had tried to make it human-scaled, I think we would have found it more difficult.” [Photo: courtesy Grand Egyptian Museum] A engineering feat The architects also had to grapple with the realities of designing such a massive structure in the desert heat of Egypt. Partly out of consideration for the operational costs of running such a space, they designed the galleries to pull in daylight from lateral angles that’s dappled through metal shading structures and overhangs. This approach also works with the collections on display. “It’s quite a lot of stone,” Heneghan says. “And stone works well with natural daylight.” To handle the sheer weight of the statues on display, the building has incredibly thick concrete floors, which also serve to regulate the building’s climate, absorbing the cool night temperatures and slowly releasing it during the heat of the day. “What we were trying to do is make a really heavy structure, like a church,” Heneghan says. [Photo: Georges & Samuel Mohsen/The GS Studio/Heneghan Peng Architects Though Heneghan Peng Architects are the design architects of the Grand Egyptian Museum, they had plenty of help bringing the concept to fruition. Even at the competition stage, once they were named one of several finalists, they called in extra assistance from the engineering firms Arup and Buro Happold. Cairo-based Raafat Miller Consulting is credited alongside Heneghan Peng Architects as the project’s architect. Given the many delays that have hampered the project, Heneghan says her firm has essentially had very little to do with the design since it was largely finalized around 2009. “Once it went into construction, we weren’t really involved,” she says. The project has evolved since then, with new structural, technological, and material changes that have necessarily altered the overall design. Heneghan says the facade of the building is a departure from a more reserved approach in the initial design, but she accepts that some tweaks were inevitable. “You know, 16 years is a really long time,” she says. But there are also parts of the final museum that were among the architect’s initial thinking about what this museum could be, way back in 2002. Heneghan seems gratified that certain major elements like the grand staircase leading up to the main galleries and the direct views of the pyramids made it through after all these years. “Some things are very much what was envisaged,” she says.
Category:
E-Commerce
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