Will AI ever sit at the C-suite table? The future of senior leadership

As the sophistication of artificial intelligence (AI) systems develop and AI becomes a key element of organizational strategy across a wide spectrum of industries, new demands are being placed on senior leaders. To understand the growing challenges leaders will face in the age of AI, we conducted interviews with 33 senior leaders in several countries across a wide range of industries. Our research highlights key capabilities and skills that leaders will require. Underlying these capabilities is a mindset oriented toward continuous learning and self-development, which will enable ongoing and rapid adaptation to change. Our findings identified the following key capabilities: digital know-how, data-driven focus, networking, ethics, and agility. To successfully navigate the coming era, senior leaders will need to focus on reskilling the workforce, recruiting and retaining highly skilled talent, building an intrapreneurial culture, and managing unprecedented changes in technologies and the nature of work.     

Balancing dominance: Diagnosing the buyer-supplier relationship

There is often more than meets the eye in any relationship—especially business relationships. Using the author's “stability matrix” can help you find out just where you stand with your customers or suppliers and where things might be headed.     

Debreu-like properties of utility representations

Traditionally the codomain of a utility function is the set of real numbers. This choice has the advantage of ensuring the existence of a continuous representation but does not allow to represent many preference structures that are relevant to utility theory. Recently, some authors have started a systematic study of utility representations that are not real-valued, introducing the notion of a Debreu chain. We continue their analysis defining two Debreu-like properties, which are connected to a local continuity of a utility representation. The classes of locally Debreu and pointwise Debreu chains here introduced enlarge the class of Debreu chains. We give several examples and analyze some properties of these two classes of chains, with particular attention to lexicographic products.     

Is liquidity the missing link?

Durand et al. (2006a ) argue that the Australian market is both internationally integrated and domestically segmented. They find that the US‐based three‐factor model captures returns of the largest stocks in Australia (evidence of international integration), but that it is unable to account for the returns of the smallest stocks (evidence of domestic segmentation). This study resolves the puzzle left by Durand et al. (2006a) . Incorporating a liquidity factor provides the missing link in their analysis: it results in a model that permits both the international integration of the largest stocks and the model can account for the returns of the smallest stocks. Our analysis highlights the important role of liquidity in Australian asset pricing.     

Simulated financial dealing room: learning discovery and student accountability

This paper identifies the effectiveness of a simulated treasury dealing room for teaching and learning. It uses a presurvey and a postsurvey to establish student perceptions of learning effectiveness. It concludes that students believe that the dealing room: (i) improves their opportunities to apply theory; (ii) provides better learning than lectures; (iii) is more effective than individual learning; (iv) improves student monitoring of learning effectiveness; and (v) improves student abilities to recognize ethical issues, develop alternative solutions to ethical problems, and evaluate solutions to ethical problems from a moral point of view. Student motivation is enhanced by: (i) the high value they place on dealing room learning; (ii) their preparedness to participate; (iii) rapidly reduced levels of anxiety about trading; and (iv) the learning resources provided.     

Managing disabilities in an integrated health environment: the experience of Aetna

Disability-related outlays are increasing at a rate well above the medical inflation rate. This article discusses the experience of one company in its attempt to manage these skyrocketing costs, by developing a new program that integrates health and related benefits by combining the medical and human resources interventions into a unified program. The authors discuss the initiation, development and progress of the program, concluding with measured results revealing reduced lost work time, improved employee health and productivity, and reduced disability costs.