Good morning. Call it the Hall of Blame. One time-honored tradition in business is to take credit for what goes well, blame disappointing results on factors beyond your control and lower the bar in tough times to be able to clear it so that your pay package remains intact. When Apple set performance targets for…
Good morning. Good morning. Phil Wahba writing this morning from New York. What’s a company to do when the founder has left—but hasn’t moved on? That’s the plight Lululemon, which reports earnings today after the bell today, finds itself in more than a decade after founder Chip Wilson departed its board. Though his methods have…
Good morning. How will AI impact Ray Dalio’s prognosis for the economy? The Bridgewater founder published a piece in Fortune this weekend, in which he argues that we are in stage 5 of what he calls the “Big Cycle.” (The global macro investor has studied the six stages of how major empires rise and fall,…
Good morning. Today is the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations by Scottish economist Adam Smith, a foundational text of modern economics that inspired the U.S.’s founders to create an economy based on free markets, fair taxation, a natural division of labor and a state focused on protecting the basic conditions…
Good morning. Earlier this week, I traveled to Target headquarters in Minneapolis to interview newly minted CEO Michael Fiddelke. Target had just reported a fourth straight quarter of comparable sales decline, continuing a slump that has seen it lose market share to many rivals. That same day, Fiddelke outlined for an audience of Wall Street…
Good morning. Goldman Sachs got some unwanted attention yesterday for its reported plans to scrap DEI criteria for its board, about a year after erasing diversity goals for its workforce. Many other companies have done the same amid a federal crackdown and several state lawsuits over corporate DEI efforts. (Starbucks won a dismissal last week…