Category: Global Business

Can you imagine a bigger business challenge than the pandemic? Well, the CEO of Delta Air Lines just explained what might come next.

It’s a great example of something I explore in my e-book, Flying Business Class: 12 Rules for Leaders From the U.S. Airlines, which you can download here for free. 

In short, no matter what business you’re in, it’s worth following the airlines. Their industry is like a nonstop parade of detailed case studies that can help you make better decisions. 

Today’s lesson comes from an interview that Delta CEO Ed Bastian did with David Faber on CNBC this month. 

They talked about the pandemic, of course. As I’ve written here before, Bastian’s optimistic outlook has stood out among his industry peers. 

But in a half-hour discussion, Bastian went further, talking about other big challenges, and more broadly, how the job of any big company CEO

2020 brought a plethora of changes to consumer behavior. Many of these changes will serve as inspiration for new product ideas and functions that will help businesses better serve their customers in the year ahead.

In many cases, serving customers better begins with great design. This applies not only to the design of physical products, but to the user experience and interface of digital products. To provide their own expert insight, a group of entrepreneurs shared some design trends they expect to see in 2021 and why these trends will be so impactful.

As 2020 forced people away from each other, 2021’s designs will attempt to bring them back together. Matthew Podolsky, managing attorney at Florida Law Advisers, P.A., predicts we will see products designed with a personal connection in mind.

“Hand-drawn elements on websites, brand logos or products add a human

If the Reddit “meme stock” episode proves anything, it’s that financial services companies and others that once thought of themselves as immune to the vagaries of the crowd can no longer ignore social media–and indeed some are actively changing as a result.

“Our plan is to take advantage of the volatility,” says Haris Khurshid, founder of Fate Capital Management, a one-year-old Chicago-based hedge fund that, starting in the second quarter, plans to invest 5 to 10 percent of its portfolio in the options of trending stocks. To discover the trends, the company has developed software that, Khurshid says, browses relevant Reddit forums for the most talked-about stocks–listening for overall sentiment–then acts to either exploit the heavily shorted stocks from the batch or take advantage of the volatility in some other way.

Fate is just one of a handful of companies that are ramping up social listening–that is, the process of

Paul Lovato was under no illusion this year would be any easier than 2020. But he hadn’t imagined this: 59 straight hours, as of Wednesday morning, without power in his house, “not even a single second,” he says.

Miraculously, the power was on at his restaurant, Jambo’s BBQ, located in Arlington, Texas, about five miles away from Lovato’s home. The bbq joint had opened in 1931 as the Triangle Inn, a dining hot spot with a secret poker room upstairs once favored by Al Capone. So early Tuesday morning, Lovato, who is from the South Side of Chicago, rolled out of bed and hopped in his Ford F-150 SuperCrew truck to pick up two employees, who agreed to come in. Then they got busy smoking the chicken. From 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., they gave away chicken soup with egg noodles to anyone desperate enough to brave the Arctic

Reddit founder and chief executive Steve Huffman, Robinhood chief executive Vladimir Tenev, and other executives and individuals involved in the recent GameStop stock saga are preparing to provide testimony and answer questions before the House Financial Services Committee Thursday. The committee hearing follows public outcry against online trading platform Robinhood and other brokers’ decisions to restrict trading in so-called meme stocks last month.

It’s been three weeks since GameStop’s stock peaked at close to $500, and free-trading pioneer Robinhood restricted trading shares of the formerly lackluster companies that have become known on Reddit and elsewhere as “stonks”–including not just GameStop, but also AMC, Blackberry, and Koss. The move prompted outrage on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum–one popular place where day-trading investors rallied behind the stocks–and calls from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ted Cruz for regulation.

That regulation, should it ever happen, is much further down the road. Tomorrow’s hearing simply could