strategy and business

Get a truly innovative chief executive to open up candidly, and you can learn a great deal. We feature five such CEOs in this issue. The first is Danny Meyer, the remarkable entrepreneur who started New York City’s iconic Union Square Cafe and the wi

A sales revolution is under way, and it can be summed up with one word: subscriptions. Faced with fierce competition and low customer switching costs, companies are turning to subscription-based offerings in search of revenue predictability. And thei

During the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, at the end of the 19th century, few people understood the intricate dynamics of financial capital. Its growth often seems slow at first, but when managed well, it doubles regularly; this exponential gro

Park yourself at a typical residential intersection in the U.S., and you’ll watch a parade of delivery vehicles pass by over the course of the day. Trucks from FedEx, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) crisscross neighborhoods, retrieving and de

On a rainy afternoon in 2016, I was leading a workshop to advance local development in Colombia; the meeting was one result of new peace accords that had ended 52 years of civil war. The atmosphere was tense and alert, as you might expect when leader

It is a truth universally acknowledged by business executives, Wall Street analysts, and investors the world over that cash is the lifeblood of an enterprise. Free cash flow is a critical business performance metric. It’s how we measure successful in

What does it take to be the CEO of a truly innovative company? In late 2017, a group of us at PwC and strategy+business working on PwC’s annual CEO survey began to ask this question. We answered it by initiating an interview series called “Inside the

In December 2014, a year shy of its 30th anniversary and as popular as ever, New York City’s Union Square Cafe faced a crippling rent increase. The soaring rents around Union Square Park, and the steady revival of the neighborhood over three decades,

One component of Danny Meyer’s culinary empire that did scale quickly is Shake Shack, which traces its origins to a temporary hot-dog cart set up in 2001 to generate donations to the revitalization of Madison Square Park. In 2004, the cart morphed in

In the early 2000s, Transpacific Industries (TPI) was on a roll. Its founder, Terry Peabody, had built it from a small coal ash recycling company into the largest Australian waste management enterprise, making about 50 debt-fueled acquisitions along

Most manufacturers, energy companies, and raw materials providers know they face a strategic challenge. Industry 4.0 is coming. Dubbed the “fourth industrial revolution” by World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, this orchestrated system of digita

Tim Armstrong works in an open-plan office that sits at an extremely busy and often cacophonous intersection near Union Square in Manhattan. As the CEO of Oath, the unit of telecommunications giant Verizon that houses AOL, Yahoo, and the Huffington P

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl, Princeton University Press, 2018 ‘‘Property,” French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously wrote, “is theft.” For this, among other radica