3 minutes estimated reading time
Francis Fukuyama
Political theorist and author Francis Fukuyama wrote one of the mis-understood books of the late 20th century. The End of History (And The Last Man) was written in 1989 and the title and Francis Fukuyama have been misquoted endlessly since.
At the 2020 Munich Security Conference Francis Fukuyama gave a talk about the book and what it actually meant from his perspective.
This one on tribalism on and populism is also very interesting.
Business
Great video on the history of HNA, which went under a mountain of debt and was unwound by the Chinese government.
HNA started off as Hainan Airlines before expanding internationally and across sectors.
Finance
M-Pesa eyes the global remittances trillion-dollar market | Quartz
Dollar funding for Chinese start-ups dries up | Financial Times – not terribly surprising given the investment and regulatory environment in China
FMCG
Macron versus McDonald’s: how France ditched disposable food packaging | Financial Times
Ideas
Why German think tanks have to change the way they work
Wokeness as mainline orthodoxy – Noahpinion – Musa al-Gharbi has a recent article with quite a bit of data showing that journalistic and academic attention to the topics of diversity, bias, privilege, and so on seems to have peaked, while “cancel culture” incidents have decreased on campuses and in corporations, and political opinions on various social issues have moderated a bit. Anecdotally, corporate interest in DEI seems to be waning as well. Other observers like Tyler Cowen have noticed the trend.
Luxury
Survey Finds Japanese People’s Dream Car Is a Lexus | Nippon.com – bad news for Mercedes & BMW. This isn’t about Japanese nationalism as Mercedes and BMW have enjoyed healthy sales in the country in the past. Much of this is about the massification of these brands and the decline in quality in comparison to the single-mindedness of Lexus engineers.
Marketing
The Drum | How Nestlé Is Using AI To Set Creative Rules For Its 15,000 Marketers – In 2021, Nestlé started to put all its creative through an AI platform that would rank ads based on their suitability to different online platforms and pull out the key elements that are required for maximum ROI. That process created a set of ’rules’ for successful campaigns and early tests generated transformational results, finding that ads that meet the new creative requirements generate a significantly higher return on ad spend. Now, Nestlé’s 15,000 marketers across 2,000 brands in 200 territories have to test the ads in the machine learning platform prior to rolling a campaign out – my biggest concern is that this becomes reductive in terms of creativity and self reinforcing rather than facilitating the picking of true winners. Secondly, I could see it over-indexing on brand activation rather than brand building spend and ultimately destroy value
Airbnb’s earnings surge after ‘incredibly effective’ marketing shift | Marketing Week – part of this is down to the fact that most online media is focused on performance marketing or brand activation rather than brand building. Pivoting to a more balanced spend will make a positive difference.
Media
Daily Mirror publisher explores using ChatGPT to help write local news | Financial Times
Online
How a Covert Firm Spreads Lies and Chaos Around the World – DER SPIEGEL
Security
US-initiated joint export curbs on China leave critical loopholes? | DigiTimes
ByteDance is quietly becoming a force in VR (and more) | Techinasia – theft of ASML proprietary information by Chinese employees. The song remains the same