Financial Mindset

Business leaders can’t predict their way through today’s turbulent environment—and should stop trying. “Instead of trying to predict the future, it’s probably better off to really enhance the muscle of adaptability,” Carol Liao, chair of BCG Greater China, said at the Fortune Leaders Forum on Sept. 8. And in an era when AI is commoditizing knowledge, she added, “judgment does have a premium.” Liao spoke alongside Chanda Beppu, president of Starbucks Asia Pacific, and Feroz Sheikh, chief information and digital officer at Syngenta Group, and all three arrived at the same prescription: Leaders should focus less on forecasting and more on building organizations that can change course quickly. Today’s executives face several challenges at once, Liao said. “There are a few anxieties Chinese leaders have,” she noted. “Globalization anxiety, AI anxiety, as well as generational shift… It’s quite a lot for leaders to think...

As U.S. prices for diesel fuel surge to all-time highs, some California pumps literally can’t price their diesel any higher—maxing out the display at $9.999 per gallon. Fuel-tracking firm GasBuddy reported Thursday that a small handful of California fueling stations hiked their retail diesel up to the maximum display pricing as the state’s overall diesel average hit $7.91 per gallon. GasBuddy said it had confirmed that the $9.999 price was on displays at pumps in the San Diego suburb of Serra Mesa on Wednesday, and that it was investigating reports in other locations. Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, cautioned that some pumps could simply be out of fuel. He noted that it is practice for some fueling stations to list “$9.999” to warn drivers away when diesel has run dry temporarily. But what is clear is that several stations in California are pricing well above $9 per gallon. On a national level, the U.S. average for diesel surpassed $6 a gallon...

When U.S. supermarket chain Walmart opened its first Chinese outlet in Shenzhen in 1996—five years before China joined the World Trade Organization—the retail landscape in the country looked vastly different. With no large-scale hypermarts, shoppers rose at dawn to snag the freshest produce at local wet markets.  Yet, in the last 30 years, China’s rising middle class and deep manufacturing capabilities has given rise to one of the world’s most dynamic, yet competitive, consumer markets. And the relentless domestic competition has proven to be a double-edged sword for retail companies: those which can’t adapt quickly are stamped out, while the most successful firms become hyper-efficient, agile and globally competitive. Walmart, for one, saw its China business grow by 20.7% last quarter. That’s faster than Walmart’s other global businesses (Walmart U.S. saw sales grow by 2.6% ), and bucks a broader trend of sluggish retail sales within China. “Customers everyw...

In 2005, two years before the iPhone came out, I was standing in a coffee line on my morning commute, watching everyone ahead of me go through the motions: order, wait, pay, wait some more. I thought there had to be a faster, better way to get my coffee. So I built one: the first text-message order for restaurants, years before smartphones made “ordering ahead” a category. Over 20 years later, I’m the founder and CEO of Olo, the restaurant commerce platform behind 800-plus restaurant brands across 90,000-plus locations, including Shake Shack, Waffle House, Cracker Barrel, Five Guys, and Panda Express. I’ve spent two decades watching the restaurant industry innovate and iterate the ordering experience, and I’m confident now is the time for a completely new direction. Here’s the problem restaurants and their guests have lived with since digital ordering went mainstream: they’ve only ever had two choices, and both come with a catch. The firs...

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming table stakes. Within a few years, every large company will have access to broadly similar predictive capabilities. And when prediction becomes a commodity, it stops being a source of competitive advantage. The next frontier is not knowing what might happen. It is deciding what the enterprise should do about it — across thousands of interconnected choices, competing objectives, and finite resources. This is the decision-making gap, and it is where much enterprise value will be won or lost over the next decade.  The Problem No System Was Built to Solve Consider the final weeks of every financial quarter. The Accounts Payable team is holding payments to protect liquidity. The Accounts Receivable (AR) team is accelerating collections to hit the receivables target. The sales team is deciding which deals to pull forward, which AR disputes to escalate, and which customers to offer a concession. Three functions, each making the ratio...

Independent researchers have identified multiple new websites where AI agents seemingly built by OpenAI took unauthorized actions, such as accessing websites, posting messages, and sharing data to communicate with each other. The latest revelations, discovered by a group of independent researchers known as the Nightingale collective, add to growing concerns that AI companies are struggling to control the agentic AI technology they’ve created. In August, a swarm of OpenAI’s AI agents hacked the Hugging Face website, and last week the Nightingale collective identified a swarm of rogue AI agents surreptitiously posting messages to an obscure German Wiki page . Now, as more researchers search the web for traces of the agents, the list of affected sites continues to grow. Researchers believe the newly discovered incidents are the work of a separate swarm of AI agents than those involved in the Hugging Face breach, since these agents were authorized to access the web whe...

Business leaders can’t predict their way through today’s turbulent environment—and should stop trying. “Instead of trying to predict the future, it’s probably better off to really enhance the muscle of adaptability,” Carol Liao, chair of BCG Greater China, said at the Fortune Leaders Forum on Sept. 8. And in an era when AI is commoditizing knowledge, she added, “judgment does have a premium.” Liao spoke alongside Chanda Beppu, president of Starbucks Asia Pacific, and Feroz Sheikh, chief information and digital officer at Syngenta Group, and all three arrived at the same prescription: Leaders should focus less on forecasting and more on building organizations that can change course quickly. Today’s executives face several challenges at once, Liao said. “There are a few anxieties Chinese leaders have,” she noted. “Globalization anxiety, AI anxiety, as well as generational shift… It’s quite a lot for leaders to think...