Shomit Ghose
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” – Mark Twain (maybe) AI Generates Pink Elephant In the present day, Mark Twain’s (or Benjamin Disraeli’s?) supposed quote might better be recast as, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and hallucinations”. In our age of generative AI, the technology’s propensity…
Read More
OpenAI Whiplash One day, there’ll be a movie, or at least a Harvard Business Review analysis, about the board vs. CEO drama that unfolded at OpenAI in the autumn of 2023. Perhaps the conflict was simply a matter of office politics. Or, as has been more darkly hinted, perhaps the matter was due to the…
Read More
“Someday” is Today To understand generative AI’s potential in the enterprise, it helps to read Isaac Asimov. Yes, science fiction from way back in the 1940s and 1950s. For example, Asimov was the one who predicted Big Data. In his Foundation Trilogy, a certain mathematics professor by the name of Hari Seldon develops a large-scale…
Read More
Envy with Green Even before the US Senate’s historic passage of 2022’s $430 billion climate bill, climate tech start-ups were on an envious tear, raising well over $30 billion in investment in 2021. In the current year we’ve seen investments in everything from companies that re-imagine air conditioning refrigerants to electricity procurement to aviation fuel. While…
Read More
Business’ “Theory of Everything”? Physicists have long sought a Theory of Everything, a single theoretical framework that explains and ties together the physical world at every scale, from the sub-atomic to the cosmic. One of the leading theoretical frameworks advanced toward this end has been string theory. In the business world, might we find a…
Read More
Economics’ Not-So-Hidden Hand Behavioral economics has been much in the public eye this century, whether it was Daniel Kahneman’s 2002 Nobel Prize in economics, Robert Shiller’s in 2013, Richard Thaler’s in 2017, or Dan Ariely’s excellent 2008 New York Times best-seller, Predictably Irrational. These works have highlighted that human decision making isn’t informed solely by the…
Read More
Virtualization Comes for Higher Ed Murder hornets. The Great Toilet Paper Panic. And New York Magazine’s thought-provoking interview with NYU’s Scott Galloway on the coming disruption to higher education. All serve to mark the calamitous year of 2020. Just as the Internet has virtualized the retail industry, it’s now begun to do the same to…
Read More
Quarantine Angst What does the jet engine have in common with penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic? Both, as it turns out, were born in 1928, but it took the crisis of the Second World War for either to be brought into the mainstream and deployed. The war’s stresses also served as catalyst to usher in…
Read More
By Shomit Ghose | March 31, 2020 Star Wars: mind-candy entertainment or a set of essential teachings for business leaders? Happily, it’s both. The sci-fi series is a great illustration of the entrepreneurial journey, while also illustrating (who knew?) academically-proven best practices for achieving business success. The case for binge-watching Star Wars is particularly apt in today’s corporate…
Read More
Adapt or Die Name a company anywhere in the world – just one! – that won’t be disrupted by Amazon or Google. These two companies, along with their fellow votaries of Big Data and machine learning, are today entering every industry, to the competitive peril of businesses large and small. The healthcare and financial industries…
Read More