Innovation

7 Skills Every Future-Ready Leader Needs

March 9, 2020

Although the future may look like it’s full of robots and artificial intelligence (it isn’t), the reality of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is that the most successful businesses, nonprofits and governments will be led by highly skilled individuals who can understand and accommodate the demands of an increasingly connected, informed and fast-moving world. Let’s take a closer look at the seven key skills every future-ready leader is going to need if they want to succeed…read more

ASU-led NASA Psyche Mission Launches Free Online Class Featuring Thunderbird’s Mansour Javidan

February 11, 2020

Course on building effective teams covers team culture, diversity, bias, and inclusivity Imagine a team of scientific experts representing 15 distinct institutions, all highly regarded in their fields with a support team of at least 350. Now imagine that team working on a finely tuned mission to space, an exploration like nothing before, a trip to study a unique metal asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Now that’s teamwork. NASA’s Psyche mission is being led by Arizona State University. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is responsible for mission management, operations, and navigation. The spacecraft’s solar-electric propulsion chassis will be built by SSL with a payload that includes an imager, magnetometer, and a gamma-ray spectrometer. The mission’s scientific goals and objectives are vast and include giving scientists the opportunity to learn more about Earth’s own metallic core. For more details: Psyche: Mission to a Metal World.read more

Thunderbird grad Ramon Laguarta leads food and beverage giant in water use, packaging, climate change mitigation efforts

PepsiCo: Helping to Build a More Sustainable Food System

February 5, 2020

During the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos in 2019, the then newly minted Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo and ’86 MBA graduate from Thunderbird Ramon Laguarta promised “huge progress” would be made by 2030 to reduce plastic waste, which contaminates humans, wildlife, and oceans. “We can reduce the amount of plastics in the system, both in our beverages and in our snack businesses," said PepsiCo's Laguarta said last year when he sat down with corporate leaders at Coca-Cola and Dow Chemical. “I’m quite optimistic that by 2030, I don't know if we're going to be solving the problem, but we'll have made huge progress against where we are today.”read more

ASU-led NASA Psyche Mission Offers Free Online Course on Team Building from Leadership Experts

February 3, 2020

NASA Psyche Mission are being designed and built in preparation for launch to the Psyche asteroid in 2022, the mission management team at Arizona State University has recently developed a series of free online courses based on the real-world challenges of running a space mission. The course series, called the NASA Psyche Mission Innovation Toolkit, is offered free worldwide to anyone with internet connection and is available via ASU’s Continuing and Professional Education platform. The courses feature interviews and experts from NASA, ASU and Psyche Mission team members. The new Psyche Mission Innovation Toolkit online course is designed to help learners understand the unique challenges of a diverse team and provides tools to help address these challenges and take actions to be more successful in working with others. Image by ASU Continuing and Professional Educationread more

World-Renowned Expert to Head ASU-Thunderbird’s Fourth Industrial Revolution and Globalization 4.0 Initiative

January 21, 2020

Landry Signé, Leader in Global Political Economy, Joins Thunderbird Landry Signé is a world-renowned expert and award-winning professor of global political economy with a long and impressive list of experience, honors, and accomplishments. Next on his list is Thunderbird where Signé is the new Professor and Founding Co-Director of Thunderbird’s Fourth Industrial Revolution Initiative and Globalization 4.0 Inititiative. Signé joins Thunderbird School of Global Management where, in addition to leading the Initiative, he will be teaching courses on global business, world governance and disruptive technologies. Perhaps most directly relevant to what Signé offers Thunderbird is the fact that he has been recognized as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader for “finding innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing issues.”read more

Bob Dudley to Retire as CEO of Oil Giant BP

January 20, 2020

1979 Thunderbird graduate was first American to lead the London-based oil giant As most of the world was planning, setting goals, building up steam to charge full-speed ahead into the new year, one prominent Thunderbird alumnus has been winding down from a stellar career in the oil and gas industry. Bob Dudley, group chief executive of BP since October 2010, plans to step down from the BP board on Feb. 4, 2020, ending a term at the helm of the oil and gas company that swung from near collapse in 2010 to rapid growth today. He leaves BP after nine years at the top and 40 years with the company. Dudley, who received a Master of International Management degree from Thunderbird in 1979, is widely credited with stabilizing the London-based oil giant when its existence was threatened.read more

Thunderbird Convenes Top World Leaders at Davos for Conversations About Climate

January 16, 2020

Discussions will introduce major new initiatives covering climate restoration, business opportunities, and stakeholder responsibilities Climate change and the impact of rising global temperatures became harder to ignore in 2019, with fires ravaging Australia and the Amazon. And for the first time in its 15-year history, climate concerns dominated the top of the annual World Economic Forum survey of 750 global government, academic, and business leaders. As he introduced Global Risks Report 2020, WEF President Borge Brende said the global leaders’ top five concerns this year were related to the failure to mitigate and adapt to climate change.read more

Will Democratizing AI Accelerate Inequality?

December 2, 2019

What kinds of decisions do you have to make every day? Likely, you will have to pick out your clothes, find a route to work, decide what to eat, see how to get home. Many such decisions are so general as to cut across ages, geographies, and economic contexts – the world gets complicated when we consider some of the differences. The difference, for instance, between people going to work and those looking for a job, between those who live paycheck to paycheck and those with a second home – simple differences in what someone has to consider, what they have to navigate, what they experience day to day. These differences establish not only material inequality but informational inequality – differences in what kinds of information people have access to, opportunities to use that information, time to research, all the search costs related to navigating the resources available in the digital world. An inequality not simply of access to information but the tools at our disposal to process that information.read more

Study, Don’t Fear, the Power of AI in Global Business

November 4, 2019

A Manager’s Introduction to AI Ethics’: Newly published chapter by Thunderbird’s Prof. Mark Esposito Talking about the opportunities and risks ahead of us as business becomes more accustomed to using Artificial Intelligence, Alibaba’s Jack Ma said he is “quite optimistic” about AI, and it presents nothing for “street smart” people and tech leaders to be afraid of. During a 45-minute conversation, which kicked off the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai in late August 2019, Ma focused on how machine learning can be a force for good.read more

Thunderbird’s 2019 CEO Profile — The Transformation of Warren Buffett

October 16, 2019

Warren Buffett is that rarest of double majors. He is a portfolio maestro whose prognostications make tons of money for a whole lot of people. The results are so good that spending the energy to build a company doesn’t add up. If so, it is like discovering the actress Hedy Lamar was a scientific genius. Buffett is the exceptional investor who is a self-taught manager, and a brilliant one at that. As he revealed in his 2015 annual letter: “Experience in business can make you a better investor, and vice versa.” He makes it sound a little simpler than it really is.read more

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