Financial Mindset

A senior vice president at Okta approved a gratuity that was $18 over the company’s threshold on a $2,000 dinner. The auditing system flagged it, a person wrote it up, an email was sent, his assistant processed it. It landed on the COO’s desk — routed there from the board. “I’m paying somebody to audit that expense report,” Okta President and COO Eric Kelleher said at a BCG-hosted breakfast roundtable at the Fortune COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona. “I’m paying somebody to flag that, and I’m paying somebody to write up an email and send to me, and I’m paying my assistant to receive the email and process it.” He let that hang in the air. “That’s waste.” Of course, we all know exactly why that process exists: someone built it and kept it that way. That person is almost certainly still in the building, certain it’s the right way to do things, defending the inefficient structure that everyon...

Geoffrey Hinton almost didn’t believe he’d won the Nobel Prize. When the committee called in 2024, the 77-year-old computer scientist ran a quick calculation in his head. What are the odds, he asked himself, that a theoretical psychologist hiding in computer science gets the Nobel Prize in physics? “Well, maybe one in two million,” he told the crowd at the Sana AI Summit in New York last week. Then again: what are the odds you dream about winning it? “Maybe one in two million … So that means it’s a million times more likely it’s a dream than reality.” The audience laughed. Hinton wasn’t done. For several days after the announcement, he said, he half-expected to wake up. The one thing that consoled him: “If it was a dream, I would wake up, and that nightmare about Trump being president wouldn’t be true.” A beat. The audience laughed as Hinton added, “I’d give it up for that.” ...

Eric Kelleher has a problem that no amount of AI can solve for him. The President and COO of Okta has agents on his team. He’s named them—Leo, Sloan, Hank, Walker—and they show up in business reviews alongside his human staff. He’s personally booked a flight to Bangalore and spent the entire trip standing up an open-source agent on a separate machine, a deliberate act of immersion he then assigned to every member of his leadership team. “That flight to me was transformative in how I recognized what the capabilities of this technology are,” he told a roomful of top operations executives at the COO Summit this week. And yet, he added, the hardest part isn’t the technology. It’s the managers. “We have trained every manager in the world to think about one thing and that is: what’s their headcount,” Kelleher said. “Our managers have spent decades learning how to think about headcounts and payroll.” The shift he...

China has quietly emerged as the global oil market’s stealthy swing consumer, potentially holding off doomsday a while longer. For months, investors wondered why crude oil prices failed to reach worst-case scenarios, even as a fifth of the world’s supply remained bottled up in Persian Gulf. To be sure, Saudi Arabia diverted exports to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, economies in Asia imposed rationing, and the world’s biggest oil-consuming countries coordinated releases from strategic reserves. But the efforts haven’t fully offset the missing Mideast oil, with the shortfall estimated at more than 10 million barrels a day. At the same time, the U.S. naval blockade on Iran removed took more barrels off the market. As a result, the ongoing stalemate between the U.S. and Iran on reaching a lasting ceasefire deal that reopens the strait has stoked increasing panic from a growing chorus of voices. “We’re approaching unheard of inventory levels,” Exxo...

Israel expanded its ground assault in Lebanon with its broadest incursion into the country in a quarter-century as Hezbollah — Iran’s most powerful regional ally — stepped up attacks on Israel’s north.  According to the Israeli military, Hezbollah fired more than 300 “projectiles” at its soldiers in Lebanon and at northern Israel over the weekend. The latest escalation has shattered a brittle ceasefire declared after the Tehran-backed group attacked Israel in response to its war on Iran, which it launched with the US on Feb. 28. As part of a military operation that started several days ago, the Israeli Defense Forces said in a statement that they’d crossed the Litani River and are near Shi’ite-majority Nabatieh — one of the biggest cities in south Lebanon — which the IDF describes as a stronghold of Hezbollah.  “I have instructed the IDF to expand the incursion in Lebanon. Our forces have crossed the Litani River and took dominant terrain,” Prime Minister Benjamin...

The two biggest U.S. oil companies joined the growing chorus of voices sounding the alarm on the imminent doom global markets could soon face. With the Strait of Hormuz still effectively closed, top oil-consuming countries have been rapidly draining their reserves, helping keep crude prices in check. But Exxon Senior Vice President Neil Chapman warned at an industry conference on Thursday that such drawdowns can’t go on indefinitely. “We’re approaching unheard of inventory levels,” he said, according to CNBC . “I mean really, really low levels. You can debate whether that’s going to hit those really low levels in two weeks or three weeks. Once you get to that point, then you’ll see price shoot up.” For now, the U.S.-Iran ceasefire talks are deadlocked while the Strait of Hormuz remains a contested waterway. That was on display Saturday, when U.S. forces fired a missile at a blockade runner to disable it after ignoring repeated warnings. Iran has also kept up ...

President Donald Trump  on Saturday branded the federal judge who  blocked his renovation  of the Kennedy Center as “an anti Trump Hater” and predicted that the nation’s premier performing arts center he wanted  to shutter for a two-year overhaul  will “soon be closed, probably never to open again.” In a lengthy post on his Truth Social platform, Trump fumed about the Friday decision from U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper who also ordered  Trump’s name  removed from the center. Clearly angered by his latest legal setback, he said it was “impossible for me to be treated fairly,” tying Cooper’s ruling to earlier losses, including the Supreme Court’s rejection in February of his  sweeping tariffs . His post aimed to make the case for the project but did not clarify whether he would continue to defend it in court. Hours after Cooper’s decision, Trump said he was backing away from the renovations and making arrangements ...