All Insights Articles

With the financial sector attempting to adapt to regulatory and economic uncertainty, firms are forced to prioritize and change. Phil Davis '85, an experienced management consultant, discusses the factors that can make organizational change succeed or fail, whether in the financial industry or another sector.

How can business leaders cultivate the broad understanding and strategic agility they need to build successful organizations? Charles Hill, an accomplished diplomat and co-founder of the Studies in Grand Strategy course at Yale, talks about how ideas from great thinkers—from Herodotus to Clausewitz—can improve business decision making.

How do you turn personal values and sense of purpose into a leadership approach? Four alumni recently recognized as Donaldson Fellows by the Yale School of Management discussed their experiences with leadership expert Tom Kolditz. The conversation, on April 4, 2013, addressed the challenges that leaders face in maintaining a sense of purpose and adapting personal goals and values to different organizational contexts, roles, and cultural environments.

Private companies Orbital Sciences and SpaceX are putting rockets into space to resupply the International Space Station. According to Orbital’s Bill Claybaugh, the only thing tougher than rocket science may be making the rocket business work.

Reduced launch costs, an explosion of angel investing, and a proliferation of incubators has created a bumper crop of early-stage startups, but taking the next step and receiving venture funding is a bigger challenge. Daniel Ciporin of Canaan Partners talks about the most promising markets and what it takes to get institutional venture capital excited.

Development organizations find themselves in fierce competition for funding. How can small nonprofits differentiate themselves so their capabilities aren't overlooked among the giants? We talked with one expert who has been delivering global health to underserved populations for decades.

Liang Meng, who founded a private equity firm after leading D.E. Shaw’s China operations, gives an overview of the fast-developing private equity market in China. He describes how demographic trends inform his investment strategy.

The days of U.S. boycotts of South Africa are long gone. The country is an economic powerhouse in Africa and a key economic partner for the U.S. In four years as U.S. ambassador to South Africa, Donald Gips ’89 worked to increase investment and trade flows between the countries.

The omnipresent smartphone has the potential to change the entire shopping experience.

More and more, the answer is yes, as the credit card industry reaches billions of consumers and tens of millions of outlets. The CMO of MasterCard WorldWide talks about the company’s efforts to compete in this global market while responding to radically different technological infrastructures, legal institutions, and cultural understandings of debt.