Author: admin

It can be tempting for companies to overinvest to scale quickly, but that enthusiasm can come back and hurt. says John Michael Reese, president and director of General Atlantic, a New York City-based private equity firm focused on investing in health care. Reese will share how healthcare companies in particular can scale more responsibly while avoiding common pitfalls. Prior to joining General Atlantic in 2017, Reese was an associate at GTCR in Chicago, where he focused on investments in the healthcare sector. He began his career as an analyst in the Leveraged Finance Group at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.…

Imagine your most productive financial analysts not sleeping, processing millions of trades in seconds, flagging risks before they materialize, and instantly telling you what the numbers actually mean for your business. It is not science fiction and is increasingly becoming a reality in today's financial functions. Having spent my career in finance and accounting, I have seen this change unfold firsthand. Organizations often focus on implementing AI tools, but the real transformation doesn't lie within the technology. It's in Redefine what it means to be a great financial professional. The companies that get this right aren't the first to automate.…

Audit committee responsibilities have become significantly more complex as companies face increasingly sophisticated risks, particularly those stemming from technology-driven and cybersecurity needs. To remain effective and efficient in this evolving environment, audit committees must continually adapt. Audit committee meetings are no exception. Audit committee meetings now address more important issues than ever before, despite a compressed schedule. of 2025 Audit Committee Practice Report (ACPR), a joint publication of the Center for Audit Quality (CAQ) and Deloitte's Center for Board Effectiveness, asked audit committee directors about their current committee priorities, challenges, and opportunities. To dig deeper into respondents' strategies for increasing…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a future consideration for corporate boards. Artificial intelligence (AI) already exists and is advancing rapidly. Companies across industries are actively experimenting with and deploying advanced AI systems, from customer-facing applications like support and sales automation to back-office functions like predictions, fraud detection, and process automation for routine rules-based processes. The pace and breadth of this development is important. According to CAQ research, 90% of S&P 500 companies will mention AI in their 10-K in 2024, up from 25% in 2023. As the benefits and risks of AI impact the entire enterprise, issues of AI oversight…

Every company has a strategy. Every company has data. But some ideas spread like wildfire, and just as good ideas die out quietly. Some leaders command the room, while others lose the room in the first 30 seconds. Some products develop a devoted following, while others, despite all the reasonable advantages, never catch on. Adam Leipzig spent 40 years figuring out why. He had to: it was his job. As a senior executive at Walt Disney Studios, he directed films such as: dead poets association and Honey, I made the kids shrink. As president of National Geographic Films, he march…

Few events disrupt organizations, large or small, more than a change in leadership. Some degree of confusion is inevitable. It is the message a leader sends in a given moment and the experiences surrounding it that determine how severe the disruption will be. But too often, organizations are carefully controlled by familiar orthodoxies, polished, over-edited statements stripped of details that rational stakeholders would want to know, leaving them stiff and empty. That strategy itself is certain to fail. What follows the statement is often much more important. The tone, honesty, and clarity of subsequent communications will determine whether employees, franchisees,…

The aggressive adoption of AI will unlock incredible productivity and efficiency. However, recent news about Anthropic's new Claude model (which has successfully “escaped” from its sandboxed test environment) proves that agent powers are extremely difficult to manage, predict, and understand. As a result, organizations need to think more holistically about the appropriate controls, oversight mechanisms and governance that both companies and boards should have in place. We must recognize so-called “human error” when a sophisticated, skilled, leading model company like Anthropic proves a risk to us. Of course, we know this from our experience with cybersecurity and the endless phishing…

Most boards today look strong on paper. Independent Directors. A well-constituted committee. Formal risk monitoring. Annual evaluation. Clear charter and disclosure discipline. But many directors privately acknowledge quieter concerns. Although the board appears to be compliant, it is not necessarily decisive. Directors are proactive, but not always ahead of the curve.They may be united, but they are not always courageous. The gap between structural and effective governance is widening. Most boards are structured. Very few are intentionally designed. The immaturity of governance is first manifested in actions. Similarly, governance maturity shows up in real-time boardroom actions long before it shows…

A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that three out of four companies are now using artificial intelligence to improve productivity, but most companies report no positive effects. A small number of companies, such as Klarna and Duolingo, have famously reversed course by replacing customer service staff with bots, only to rehire them due to customer backlash. But for most senior executives, a second wave of big spending on AI is one of their top corporate priorities in the coming years. Over the past decade, U.S. companies have invested a total of $471 billion in artificial…

What is a unique way to combine physical activity and video games? Create replayable, high-tech, immersive game rooms where players compete in physical and mental challenges. The concept quickly spread across regions. That's what Adam and Megan Schmidt did when they founded Activate Games, a new kind of experiential entertainment venue where patrons can immerse themselves in “real-life video games.” Founded in 2017 with a single location in Winnipeg, Canada, Activate Games was named the fastest growing leisure and entertainment brand by the U.S. government. financial timeshas more than 50 locations in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Singapore,…