In 2023, Coutts, a British bank and part of the NatWest group, closed the bank account of Nigel Farage, a prominent UK political figure and now leader of Reform UK. While initially arguing that the closure was for commercial reasons, it subsequently emerged that Farage’s political views were an important factor in the bank wanting to remove him as a client. The episode […]

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The US administration has taken a 10% stake in Intel. The Pentagon (or should I now say the Department of War) has taken a $400 million preferred equity stake in a rare earth mining company. The administration is twisting corporate arms in many ways in pursuit of its political agenda. Predictably, this has generated a […]

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The current model of hyper-globalisation has run its course. It’s time to re-think – and actually do something – before the whole edifice comes crashing down. In 2018 my colleague David Boyle and I wrote a book titled Backlash: Saving Globalisation from Itself. We argued that the current form of hyper-globalisation was politically unsustainable. That […]

The post Is Globalisation Worth Saving? appeared first on CEOWORLD magazine.

It is not often that a thoughtful newspaper like the Financial Times gets it backwards.  In a recent editorial, the FT examined the trend for outflows from ESG funds. It stated that ‘the lustre of ESG has largely been dimmed by politicisation.’  This is what has it exactly backwards. ESG is not a financial issue that has been politicized. Rather […]

The post Rejoice! The financialization of ESG is dying appeared first on CEOWORLD magazine.

Recently, after giving a keynote at a major conference about The New Political Capitalism I was asked a question: “But business has always had a political dimension. So, what has changed?” Good question. The answer – almost everything has changed. What a business is for? The first thing that has changed is that the Milton […]

The post What Has Changed? Almost Everything. appeared first on CEOWORLD magazine.

Several decades ago, when I was an executive at a major pharmaceutical company, the CEO asked me to go along with him to one of the company’s manufacturing facilities where he was going to give a speech to the assembled workforce. The speech had been written for him by the Head of Corporate Strategy and […]

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There is, perhaps, no greater misnomer than Artificial ‘Intelligence’. Yet, there is little doubt that the development of machine learning systems will have implications for all of us. And many of those implications are political.  When I published my book exploring the political implications of business activities, some were dismissive, continuing to believe in the […]

The post THE DANGERS AND OPPORTUNITIES OF ARTIFICIAL UN-INTELLIGENCE appeared first on CEOWORLD magazine.

We’ve heard it for decades. We have been ‘on the brink’ of a clean industrial revolution seemingly forever. It never came. Now it’s here and, as always, driven by government policy. The threat from climate change has been the subject of conversation, activism, and often aggressive debate for decades. It has successfully laid solid foundations […]

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China is a market of one billion consumers becoming ever most prosperous. We have to access that market. It’s where much of our future growth will come from. To access the market, we have been willing to do what it takes – embark on joint ventures, share intellectual property – whatever. So claimed a C-suite […]

The post Managing the Authoritarian Business Risk appeared first on CEOWORLD magazine.

Several years ago, I was speaking to an investment manager who constantly delivered a good and steady financial performance. I asked him what his investment principles were. One of them, he said, was that he never invested in anything that was labeled as ‘exciting.’ His view was that exciting things were all too often hype […]

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