According to an announcement made this month by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), worldwide chip sales for June 2014 established the highest monthly sales record for the industry. More specifically, sales reached $82.7 billion during the second quarter. This represents a 10.8% increase from the second quarter of 2013. In the first half of 2014, [...]
According to CNN.com and the American Academy of Family Physicians, traditional house calls by doctors declined from 40% in the 1930s to 1% in more recent times. Costs played a key role in this change. Given this decline, the desire to avoid long waits in physician offices and the concerns about health costs, what are [...]
Is it confidence or arrogance that you are seeing in your leaders? An actual example from leadership benchmarking work I did with international executives may help to answer this question. As I exited the elevator at a Fortune 500 company where I was scheduled to interview a leader I had not met, I heard someone [...]
Given the impact that dark pools and high-frequency trading can have on financial markets, it is not surprising that both practices are garnering more attention from government agencies as well as banks and investment firms. High-frequency trading involves using powerful computers to trade stocks at very fast speeds ahead of other investors. By using complex [...]
The trend of consolidation among engineering and construction (E&C) companies rolls on. In addition to AMEC’s acquisition of Foster Wheeler and Martin Marietta’s purchase of Texas Industries earlier in the year, two more key players are joining forces. As reported by Reuters this week, Los Angeles-based AECOM Technology Corp. announced its plans to acquire San [...]
With 1,517 publicly-traded U.S. organizations to date submitting securities filings with the terms “data breach,” “hacking,” “cybersecurity” and “hacker” as potential business risks according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, cyber threats are getting more attention. If you compare this to 2012, you will find a 42% increase in the number of organizations listing these [...]
At last week’s annual I/O conference, Google introduced Google Fit, its new approach for obtaining a foothold in the coveted medical device sector. Google Fit joins Apple’s HealthKit and Samsung’s SAMI in trying to consolidate health data collected from different apps and wearables to get a comprehensive view of someone’s health. At this point, the [...]
Who should be on the executive team, and how can we help ensure that the team operates in an effective manner? These are frequent questions that I encounter when working with organizations, and they are important questions given that teams fail about 60% of the time according to the research of Eunice Parisi-Carew. Many organizations [...]
Wal-Mart appears to be willing to try almost anything to offer more goods and services to its customers. While the major retailer will not sell insurance, it did announce it is collaborating with AutoInsurance.com to meet the auto insurance needs of its customers. All customers have to do is click a link on walmart.com to [...]
Transparency Market Research released a new report titled, Industrial Controls and Robotics Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 2013 – 2019. The findings in this report provide some noteworthy statistics. The global industrial controls and robotics industry was worth $102.02 billion in 2012, and it is projected to reach $147.7 [...]