Philippa Kaur

If there is one thing guaranteed to get Americans to stand to attention it is cheap Viagra. On June 2nd a firm owned by Mark Cuban, a billionaire investor (as well as a judge on “Shark Tank”, a tv show for budding entrepreneurs, and the owner of an nba basketball team), caused a stir by reducing the price of the blue pill—whose patent expired two years ago—from several dollars a pop to 11 cents. It was one of 87 drugs that the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company added to its growing assortment of cheap off-patent medicines. A new study finds that Mr Cuban’s prices might have saved Medicare, a federal health scheme for the elderly, $3.6bn on $9.6bn-worth of drugs it had bought in 2020. Drugs in America are notoriously dear. In 2019 spending on prescription medicines came to $1,126 per citizen, twice the figure in other rich counties (see chart). Critics like Mr Cuban seek to shake things up. He intends to offer thousands of cheaper drugs by the end of the year. His company buys these directly from manufacturers and sells them to consumers at cost, plus a 15% mark-up and a $3 pharmacy fee. The idea is to make drugs affordable to the 31m Americans who lack health insurance and the many more whose policies make them pay hefty fees for prescriptions. Patients have thanked him on social media for slashing the cost of drugs to treat conditions ranging from heartburn to cancer. Mr Cuban is not the only one to have lost patience with America’s current set-up. CivicaScript, from Lehi, Utah, is also trying to bring down the price of generics. In March it said it would manufacture a generic insulin at no more than $30 a vial, down from $300 for today’s branded versions. At the innovative, patented end of the market, meanwhile, eqrx and Checkpoint Therapeutics are developing new cancer and immunology drugs with the explicit intention of undercutting expensive existing therapies from big pharma.Competing on price seems like an obvious thing to try in America’s overpriced drug market. A lack of such competition suggests that obstacles get in the way. Some of these are practical. Certain off-patent drugs take years to copy, manufacture, test and win regulatory approval. Insulin, a complicated biological molecule, is one of them. Having borne the expense of copying and certifying its insulin, CivicaScript may find that the incumbents, which have long since recouped their development costs, simply lower the price of their branded products to undercut it instead. Ned McCoy, CivicaScript’s boss, insists this would make him happy; the firm’s goal, he says, is to bring about change in the market. The firm is set up as a public-benefit corporation that is not seeking profits but rather a “positive impact on society”. But it cannot do that if it goes out of business. In the American market for patented medicines, the drug’s inventor has a great deal of pricing power, which has driven prices higher. Developing new therapies is a costly gauntlet of research, clinical trials and regulatory hurdles. All too often it ends in failure. Risks can be reduced by picking well-understood diseases. Nevertheless, to succeed in the long run, eqrx will need to make up with volume what it forgoes on margins, observes Daniel Chancellor of Informa Pharma Intelligence, a research firm. The same applies to others who choose this model, like Checkpoint. Britain’s government has indicated that it would make large-scale purchases from eqrx’s pipeline of cancer drugs if those gain regulatory approval. Though this will not help American patients in the near term, it is good news for the company if it helps scale up production. The final wrinkle is that any medicine-seller who undercuts incumbents becomes a target for acquisition by them. It is easy to imagine a pharma giant launching a takeover bid for the firm, and if successful simply jacking up prices to what the market will bear—which in America is a lot more than what eqrx wants to charge. After buying a biotech startup that had developed a hepatitis drug in 2011, one big drugmaker, Gilead, charged much more for the treatment than its target had planned. On June 13th Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, noted that the market was undervaluing the drugs being developed by eqrx. On the topic of being acquired, eqrx’s boss, Melanie Nallicheri, remarks cryptically that the firm has put thought into how “not to let that happen”, but declines to give details. Mr Cuban shares the sentiment: “I don’t have a reason to sell…I can afford to absorb the losses that come from starting the company.” CivicaScript, too, has made itself an unattractive investment by ceding control over a lot of what it can do to a second non-profit sister company, Civica. The poison pill, it seems, has a place in the pharma business. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

In china’s world of video-game warcraft the phrase chong ta describes the storming of a castle before you are equipped with the right weapons and armour. More recently the term has been used to refer to an equally foolhardy and even more treacherous act: posting risky comments or content on Chinese social media knowing full well that this will incur the wrath of censors, or even higher-level officials.NetEase, a Chinese games developer, is familiar enough with the first meaning. Chong ta is, after all, a staple of “Diablo Immortal”, a hugely popular role-playing game set in medieval times. The firm was due to release the Chinese version of the game, developed together with Activision Blizzard, an American gaming giant, on June 23rd. On June 19th it delayed the roll-out, supposedly to further optimise the new version, prompting a 10% slide in its share price. Rumours swirled that chong ta’s second interpretation played a role. In late May the firm’s official “Diablo Immortal” account on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like service, posted a controversial question: “How has the bear not stepped down yet?” The cryptic message was widely interpreted as a reference to Xi Jinping, China’s president, who has often been likened online to Winnie the Pooh (apparently because he resembles the podgy bear’s Disneyfied depiction). The Weibo account was banned in June, shortly before the game’s scheduled release. Many Chinese netizens immediately spied chong ta. It wouldn’t be the first time inopportune online content has cost a Chinese tech company dearly. Last year Wang Xing, founder of Meituan, a delivery super-app, posted on Weibo a 1,000-year-old Tang dynasty poem. After certain internet users construed the verse as an affront to Mr Xi, investors fearful of state reprisal dumped Meituan stock. The firm’s share price fell by 14% over two days, erasing about $26bn in market value. On June 3rd a live-streamed broadcast of Li Jiaqi, an online influencer known to his millions of fans as Lipstick King, was suddenly cut off after he was presented with a piece of cake shaped like a tank. He has not appeared on his show since—a blow to Taobao, the e-commerce platform on which he plies his trade (as well as to international make-up brands), ahead of a big Chinese shopping holiday. Mr Li’s disappearance is widely assumed to be linked to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, in whose bloody suppression tanks played a role. The vehicles’ likenesses are thus scrubbed from the internet around the anniversary, lest they remind anyone of what happened that day in 1989. In recent months Chinese authorities have been signalling that their two-year crackdown on the consumer internet—which at its worst lopped some $2trn off the market value of Chinese tech firms, compared with late 2019—was easing. This month, for example, regulators even approved a new batch of games. The Diablo debacle and the Lipstick King’s predicament imply that any respite may be short-lived and selective. So do new rules requiring internet platforms to review user comments before they are posted, a draft of which was unveiled on June 17th.It is unclear if either NetEase’s alleged Pooh, Mr Wang’s poem or Mr Li’s pudding was in fact a defiant act of chong ta. Mr Li’s turreted, cookie-wheeled ice-cream cake certainly does not smack of premeditated subversion; the Lipstick King had not previously shown a dissident streak and it is hard to imagine him wilfully sacrificing a lucrative gig. Mr Wang’s sin may well have been to fail to consider all the possible interpretations of his post. Whether or not the managers of NetEase’s Weibo accounts knew what they were getting into, their plight—and that of Messrs Li and Wang—suggests that divining censors’ thought processes is becoming an ever bigger part of doing business in China. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

In a monty python sketch from 1969, the middle-aged Mr Anchovy, played by Michael Palin, wants to give up what he calls the desperately dull world of chartered accountancy in order to become a lion-tamer. His “vocational guidance counsellor”, aka John Cleese, suggests he consider an interim career path—banking, say—while he works towards lion-taming. “No, no, no, no, no,” Mr Anchovy interrupts. “I don’t want to wait. At nine o’clock tomorrow I want to be in there, taming.”Echoes of Mr Anchovy’s yearnings can be heard in the haste with which ey, one of the Big Four accounting firms, is considering spinning off its fast-growing consultancy practice from the unfashionable audit side of the business. Not only is it a bold move by the standards of book-keeping firms—to the point, says Michael Izza of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, that ey’s three rivals, Deloitte, pwc and kpmg, will be considering their next steps in light of its decision. There is also a hint of Pythonesque farce about it. Such is the excitement that details of a proposed initial public offering (ipo) in 2023 were leaked to the Wall Street Journal, which published them on June 20th. They included the size of the potential bonanza for some of the firm’s 13,000 partners—something ey’s bean-counters of old would much rather have kept under their bowler hats. The firm insists no final decision has been made. Yet a split would make sense. Regulators worry that consulting services generate conflicts of interest for firms also carrying out statutory audits. After a string of accounting scandals in recent years they are urging the auditors to stand on their own two feet. As for an ipo, that is bound to set consultants’ hearts racing. But like Mr Anchovy, they should think twice before they leap into the lion’s den. In the long run, audit may well be the more prudent bet. Make no mistake, the advisory practice is the red-blooded side of the business. It accounted for two-thirds of ey’s $40bn in revenues last year. Unshackling much of the tax, consulting, strategy and transactions work from audit would give the consulting arm more room for manoeuvre and free it from a partnership model that smothers quick decision-making. The new advisory firm could raise capital more easily to invest in technology, as well as developing trendy outsourcing businesses such as fully running multinationals’ tax affairs. It could bolster its fortunes by offloading niche businesses. (Not that it needs to wait for an ipo to do that: last year pwc sold one that handles global companies’ foreign postings to a private-equity firm for $2.2bn, its biggest divestment in nearly two decades.) There is an even more enticing precedent. Accenture, which was spun off from Arthur Andersen and then went public a year before the accounting firm collapsed in 2002, has soared in value to $190bn. ey’s consulting arm would not be worth close to that. However, the leaked documents, based on recent market conditions, suggest it could raise $10bn by selling a 15% stake. The partners who join it would receive 70% of the shares (the remaining 15% would be for lowlier staff).It is not all upside for the consultants, though. The split would involve a cash payout from the spun-off company to partners remaining in the rump ey, and would cover potential claims against the firm for problems such as those at Wirecard, a failed German payments company, and nmc Health, a collapsed British hospital chain, both of which ey audited. To make the payment, the new firm would reportedly borrow $17bn—a large sum considering that publicly traded rivals like Accenture and tcs have low debts.Those are not the only competitors, either. Barriers to entry in consulting are low. Big tech firms such as Microsoft and data-miners such as Palantir may try to muscle into the space. The ey brand may have raised the stature of the consultancy practice, but it will probably be floated with a new name. Like some other consultants, it could fall victim to delusions of grandeur.That is why, despite being the pedestrian side of the business, audit could be a dark horse. Its shortcomings are well known: lack of trust, conflicts of interest, low pay compared with other professional services, the risk that ai-powered “audit bots” will crawl over its business model. Yet it has some advantages. For one thing, it remains an entrenched oligopoly. The Big Four audit 99% of firms in the s&p 500 index. Moreover, structural changes are afoot that could benefit it. The first is regulatory. As the Big Four auditors are forced to become more independent, they are raising fees. As pressure mounts to improve audit quality, they will charge more for it. The second change is to their scope. The firms are expecting a lot of new work as regulators force companies to disclose more about their climate impact. Much of this will have to be checked and approved by auditors. One senior accountant talks excitedly about hiring “thousands of eco-warriors”.If history is any guide, the windfall from the split may favour the auditors, too. Though the partners remaining on the audit side would receive lower payouts than those departing with the consultancy, cash in hand is precious, especially in times of volatile markets. The last time ey split off its consultancy, selling it to Capgemini, a French firm, in 2000, the partners who received cash, not shares, did better. And after that the auditors simply rebuilt the consulting side of the business. Even now they plan to retain elements of advisory work, such as parts of the tax practice. These could again be reconstructed into something bigger.Ants in the pantsThose with long memories, such as the older partners, will know all this. Many of the more junior ones may find themselves lured by the eat-what-you-kill excitement of consultancy. But if they ignore history, they should not ignore comedy. Mr Anchovy never did become a lion-tamer. What he thought was a lion was instead an anteater. Shown a photo of a real lion, he passed out. ■Read more from Schumpeter, our columnist on global business:Amazon has a rest-of-the-world problem (Jun 16th)What’s gone wrong with the Committee to Save the Planet? (Jun 9th)Why Proxy advisers are losing their power (Jun 2nd)For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

Management is not a heroic calling. There is no Marvel character called “Captain Slide Deck”. Books and television shows set in offices are more likely to be comedic than admiring. When dramas depict the workplace, managers are almost always covering up some kind of chemical spill. Horrible bosses loom large in reality as well as in the popular imagination: if people leave their jobs, they often do so to escape bad managers. And any praise for decent bosses is tempered by the fact that they are usually paid more than the people they manage: they should be good. A world without managers is a nice idea. But teams need leaders, irrespective of the quality of the people in charge. Someone has to take decisions, even if they are bad ones, to prevent the corporate machine gumming up with endless discussions. That is true even of flatter organisations. In a paper published in 2021, researchers described an experiment in which a number of different teams took part in an escape-room challenge. Some randomly selected groups were asked to choose a leader before the task began; the rest were not. The teams with leaders did much better: 63% of them completed the challenge within an hour, compared with only 44% of those in the control group.The difference between good bosses and bad ones is striking. In one paper published in 2012, a trio of academics looked at the output of workers in a large services company who frequently switched between different supervisors. They found that the gap in output between the best and worst bosses was equivalent to adding an extra person to a nine-member team. Even the average boss enhanced their team’s productivity by enough to justify their higher salary. Managers are needed, but they do not have it easy. The job is structurally difficult. Most managers have to meet the expectations, sometimes unreasonable, of people below them and above them. The blurring of work-life boundaries as a result of the covid-19 pandemic seems to have made life tougher for them. Gallup, a pollster, found that in 2021 managers suffered higher levels of self-reported burnout than workers, and that the gap between these groups had widened considerably over the previous year. They are subject to conflicting demands. They are meant to care about members of their teams and be ready to get rid of them. They are supposed to give people agency while making sure that things are done in the way the organisation wants. The concept of the “servant leader” is utter nonsense. (What next? The weepy psychopath? The serf dictator?) It is also a reflection of the different directions in which bosses are pulled. Many of those in positions of power don’t want to be managing at all. True, some of them have found their way into management because of thrusting ambition. But others have wound up there because it is the only route available to more pay and greater influence. Hence another screwed-up office character: the “reluctant leader”. Managers are also handling the most baffling material on Earth: people. A study conducted by researchers in Germany found that handing out monetary bonuses for good attendance to apprentices in retail stores led to sharp rises in absenteeism (paying for behaviour that was previously considered normal seems to have made people feel licensed to bunk off). Another piece of research, by academics at iese Business School and the Poole College of Management, found that empowering employees could lead to more unethical behaviour if workers felt under greater pressure to perform. The law of unintended consequences runs through the workplace.Managers are allegedly human, too, and also susceptible to bias. Bosses who take steps to encourage employees to contribute their ideas are doing the right thing by their organisations and by their teams. But according to research by Hyunsun Park of the University of Maryland and her co-authors, the more they solicit input, the less likely they are to reward people for speaking up. Instead, they credit themselves for creating the right kind of environment. Laudable, no. Natural, yes. It is true that managers do not save lives or nurture young minds. Even the best ones spout jargon and cause unholy amounts of irritation. The worst ones make life a misery. But the job that managers do is almost always necessary, often unpopular, sometimes done reluctantly and pretty difficult to boot. Every so often that is worth remembering. Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on management and work:Work, the wasted years (Jun 16th)Corporate jets: emblem of greed or a boon to business? (Jun 9th)Do not bring your whole self to work (Jun 2nd) More

Tech giants, governments, trustbusters, investors: all eyes are on the much-anticipated stockmarket listing of Arm. Despite the recent rout in tech stocks, SoftBank, the Japanese group that paid $32bn for the British chip designer in 2016, still plans to refloat its shares by next March. On May 30th Cristiano Amon, boss of Qualcomm, an American chipmaker, told the Financial Times he would like to create a consortium with rivals like Intel or Samsung, either to buy a controlling stake in Arm or to purchase it outright—as Nvidia, another American firm, tried to do in 2020 in an abortive $40bn deal. Some British politicians argue that Arm is so critical that the government should take a controlling “golden share”. On June 14th it was reported that, perhaps in response, SoftBank was considering a secondary listing in London alongside the primary one in New York. Look at Arm’s finances and the interest seems puzzling. Its sales rose by 35% last year to $2.7bn—not bad, but peanuts next to the giants of chip design. Its valuation, as implied by the Nvidia deal, has risen by a quarter in six years. In the same period Qualcomm’s market capitalisation is up by half and Nvidia’s has risen 13-fold, recent market carnage notwithstanding.There are two explanations of the mismatch between Arm’s size and the covetousness it elicits. The first is the ubiquity of its products. Spun out of the wreckage of Acorn Computers, a British maker of desktops, in 1990, Arm has grown to the point where nearly all big tech firms use its designs. Most modern phones contain at least one chip built atop its technology. That makes it a keystone in the $500bn chip industry. Arm’s second selling point is its potential. After years of trying, its designs are making inroads into lucrative markets such as personal computers and data centres. They could also power everything from cars to light bulbs as everyday object become computers. Start with the ubiquity. Unlike firms such as Intel, which sells chips that it both designs and manufactures, Arm trades only in intellectual property (ip). For a fee, anyone can license one of its off-the-shelf designs, tweak it if necessary, and sell the resulting chip. Besides licensing revenue, Arm takes a small royalty from every sale of a chip built with its technology. In 2021 licensing revenues accounted for a bit over $1bn, while royalties brought in $1.5bn.Removing the need to design a chip—a complicated, highly specialised job—has made Arm’s off-the-shelf designs popular, especially as chips have become more and more complicated. New Street Research, a firm of technology analysts, reckons Arm has a 99% share of the $25bn market for smartphone chips. Its products are widely used in everything from drones and washing machines to smart watches and cars. Arm says it has sold just under 2,000 licences since its founding (see chart). More than 225bn chips based on its designs have been shipped. It hopes to hit 1trn by 2035. The firm’s long customer list explains the backlash against Nvidia’s proposed buy-out. Simon Segars, who stepped down as Arm’s boss this year, used to describe the firm as the neutral “Switzerland of the tech industry”. Other chipmakers feared that giving a rival control of it would undermine this neutrality, explains Geoff Blaber of ccs Insight, a research firm. So did trustbusters in big markets, whose concerns derailed the deal. Few were reassured when Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s boss, insisted that he had no plans to use Arm to stymie rivals. That same roster of customers is also part of the explanation for the mismatch between Arm’s importance and its finances. Low prices were one reason why Arm’s technology triumphed over rival chip architectures. New Street reckons that Arm earns royalties of just $1.50 from the sale of a high-end smartphone, for which consumers fork out $1,000 or more. Cheaper gadgets might earn it a few cents. The firm has raised its royalty rates over time, notes Pierre Ferragu of New Street, often when a new version of its designs is released. According to one insider, SoftBank wanted to increase them further. But, he says, the plan caused friction with Arm’s bosses, who worried this would irk existing customers. It could also jeopardise Arm’s effort to conquer new markets. In 2020 Apple, which has long used Arm chips in iPhones, began replacing Intel silicon in its laptops and desktops with Arm’s designs. Although Apple is not as big in this business as it is in smartphones, it was a vote of confidence for Arm in what had been foreign territory. Arm has also increasingly been competing in the high-margin business of servers, the high-spec machines found in data centres. That market has for decades been dominated by Intel, but in recent years Arm has scored notable victories. Amazon Web Services, the e-commerce giant’s cloud division, now uses lots of Arm-derived “Graviton” chips. Ampere, an American firm that sells data-centre chips, also bases its products on Arm’s designs, as do several makers of specialised processors for tasks such as managing networks. TrendForce, another research firm, predicts that Arm processors could account for 22% of installed server chips by 2025. Under SoftBank’s ownership Arm has put lots of money into research and development, says Mr Blaber. That will help it maintain its technological edge. It is nevertheless limited in how much it can charge for its products by the emergence of a new challenger: risc-v. This is a novel chip architecture that lacks royalties and licence fees. In 2020 Renesas, an Arm licensee, announced it would use risc-v for a new generation of products. Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung, among others, are also eyeing the technology. Whatever Arm’s fate, then—as a public company, a state-controlled one or the ward of a consortium of chip-industry heavyweights—its future will therefore probably resemble its past: vital but, by Silicon Valley standards, a minnow. ■ More

Rich countries pour heart-stopping amounts of money into health care. Advanced economies typically spend about 10% of gdp on keeping their citizens in good nick, a share that is rising as populations age. America’s labyrinthine health-industrial complex consumes 17% of gdp, equivalent to $3.6trn a year. The American system’s heft and inertia, perpetuated by the drugmakers, pharmacies, insurers, hospitals and others that benefit from it, have long protected it from disruption. Its size and stodginess also explains why it is being covetously eyed by big tech. Few other industries offer a potential market large enough to move the needle for the trillion-dollar technology titans.In 2021 America’s five tech behemoths collectively spent more than $3bn on speculative health-care bets (see chart)—and may have invested more in undisclosed deals. Some of their earlier health-related investments are starting to pay off. Amazon runs an online pharmacy and its telemedicine services reach just about everywhere in America that its packages do, which is to say most of it. Apple’s smartwatch keeps accruing new health features, most recently a drug-tracking one. Meta has scrapped its own smartwatch plans earlier this year but offers fitness-related fun through its Oculus virtual-reality goggles. Microsoft is expanding its list of health-related cloud-computing offerings (as is Amazon, through aws, its cloud unit). Yet it is Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent, whose health-care ambitions seem to be the most vaulting. Between 2019 and 2021 Alphabet’s venture-capital arms, Google Ventures and Gradient Ventures, and its private-equity unit, CapitalG, made about 100 deals, a quarter of Alphabet’s combined total, in life sciences and health care. So far this year it has injected $1.7bn into futuristic health ideas, according to cb Insights, a data provider, leaving its fellow tech giants, which spent around $100m all told, in the dust. Alphabet is the fifth-highest-ranking business in the Nature Index, which measures the impact of scientific papers, in the area of life sciences, behind four giant drugmakers and 20 spots ahead of Microsoft, the only other tech giant in the running. The company has hired former senior health regulators to help it navigate America’s health-care bureaucracy. Alphabet’s approach to innovation—throw lots of money at lots of projects—has served it well in some other businesses beyond its core search engine. It has given rise to clever products, from Gmail and Google Docs to the Android mobile operating system and Google Maps, which support people’s digital lives. Alphabet thinks that some of its health offerings will become as central to their physical existence. Is that an accurate prognosis?Techno-pharmacopoeiaAlphabet has dabbled in health since 2008, when Google introduced a service that allowed users to compile their health records in one place. That project was wound up in 2012, resurfaced in 2018 as Google Health, which included Google’s other health ventures, and was again dismantled last year. Today Alphabet’s health adventures can be divided into four broad categories. These are, in rough order of ambition: wearables, health records, health-related artificial intelligence (ai) and the ultimate challenge of extending human longevity.Google launched itself into the wearables business in 2019 with a $2.1bn acquisition of Fitbit. The firm’s popular fitness tracker has been counting steps and other exertions on around 100m wrists. It has come a long way since the Nintendo Wii motion-detecting game console that inspired Fitbit’s founders. A new feature—a sensor which monitors changes in the heart rate for irregularities that can lead to strokes and heart failure—has just been been approved by America’s Food and Drug Administraton (fda). Google is also trying to boost the health-care potential of its other devices. To help it along, it has enlisted Bakul Patel, a former official tasked with creating the regulatory classification of “software as a medical device” at the fda.The fda’s stamp of approval for the Fitbit sensor is a big deal. It should make it easier to get a similar thumbs-up for Google’s higher-end Pixel Watch, which uses a lot of the same technology and is due out this autumn, as well as other gadgets. For example, the camera on its Pixel phones can be used to detect respiration and heart rates by tracking the subtle colour difference brought about by the fact that blood with fresh oxygen in it is slightly brighter. Google’s Nest smart-thermostat-turned-home-assistant can listen to snoring to assess your sleep. As significant, if not more, is that Google considered the regulatory go-ahead worth getting. It signals that the company intends its products to be more than fun consumer gadgets, actually able to influence the practice of medicine.Google is also giving health records another whirl. The new initiative, called Care Studio, is aimed at doctors rather than patients. Google’s earlier efforts in this area were derailed in part by hospitals’ sluggishness in digitising their patient records. That problem has mostly gone away but another has emerged, says Karen deSalvo, Google’s health chief—the inability of different providers’ records to talk to each other. Dr de Salvo has been vocal about the need for greater interoperability since her days in the Obama administration, where she was in charge of co-ordinating American health information technology. Until that happens, Care Studio is meant to act as both translator and repository (which is, naturally, searchable).Alphabet’s ai projects are also beginning to produce results. Starting in 2016 DeepMind, a British startup bought by Google in 2014, used data from Britain’s National Health Service (nhs) to create diagnostic tools, in one case training an ai algorithm to detect retinal diseases. It made headlines last year with AlphaFold, a groundbreaking piece of software that can predict the structure of proteins, which is responsible for many of the complex molecules’ characteristics. Alphabet has also launched another subsidiary, Isomorphic Labs, which will be run by DeepMind’s boss and use machine learning to build on AlphaFold to accelerate (and cheapen) drug discovery. The most out-there part of Alphabet’s health portfolio is an effort to slow the ageing process—or stop it altogether. The idea is that ageing should be viewed not as an immutable aspect of life but as a condition that can be managed and treated, or a problem that can be solved with the right technology. To that end one of Alphabet’s life-sciences subsidiaries, Calico, is looking into age-related diseases in partnership with AbbVie, a big drug firm that has chipped in $2.5bn and which last year extended the deal until 2030. Another Alphabet subsidiary, Verily, is working with L’Oréal, a French beauty giant, to better understand how ageing impacts the biology of the skin—and thus create better skincare. Inspiring stuff, to be sure. But obstacles remain. Some are technical. The data DeepMind got from the nhs proved hard for ai to digest. DeepMind’s ai assistant for doctors, called Streams, has been discontinued. Given the strides being made in machine learning, it may be only a matter of time before something like Streams is resuscitated. Other hurdles may be harder to overcome. Trustbusters are increasingly wary of letting through deals that might be seen as stifling nascent competitors. In Europe competition authorities have forbidden Fitbit (but not the Pixel watch) from favouring Google’s own phones and operating system, or from using user data to sell advertising. Governments also fret about privacy breaches, which is even more sensitive than usual when it comes to medical information. Last month plaintiffs filed a class-action lawsuit against DeepMind for misuse of nhs patient data. DeepMind has not made a public statement on the case. Last, good ideas are not the same things as a good business. The wearables market is highly competitive. So, increasingly, is the one for electronic health records. Google’s reputation for technical brilliance has not exactly made Care Studio into an overnight success; the system is reportedly used by just 200 or so clinicians. Verily, which besides solving ageing also offers various diagnostics, signed $50m-worth of contracts for covid-19 testing during the pandemic, a tidy sum but chump change next to Alphabet’s total annual revenues of nearly $260bn. DeepMind as a whole reportedly turned a profit for the first time in 2020 (seemingly from selling services back to the rest of Alphabet) but it gives away its flagship health product, AlphaFold, for nothing. Calico could be years away from generating real revenues, let alone profits. These are open-ended bets that a company of Alphabet’s size can absorb. Still, in the next decade the task will be to show they can graduate from being experiments and vanity projects to being transformative for the firm—and for Americans’ health. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

The indian premier league (ipl) is awash with cash. cvc Capital, a European buy-out firm, paid $750m for the Gujarat Titans, one of the cricket extravaganza’s newest teams. In an auction ahead of this year’s competition, which concluded last month (with the Titans’ victory), the ipl’s ten sides splurged $71m on 204 players, five times the amount spent five years ago (when there were eight of them). Another auction, held between June 12th and 14th, attracted even more serious dosh. Media heavyweights fought for the right to show ipl matches to cricket-mad Indians for the next five years. Disney, which owns the current package, managed to hold on to the tv rights by agreeing to part with $3bn. It lost the online-streaming rights to Viacom18, a joint venture between Paramount Global, a fellow American media firm, and the media unit of Reliance, an Indian conglomerate, which will pay $2.6bn for the privilege. For another $500m or so, Viacom18 also scooped up the international rights for Australia and New Zealand, Britain and South Africa, the other big cricket markets, and a smaller domestic package for high-profile games. In all, the auction has netted the ipl $1.2bn per season—less eye-watering than, say, the English Premier League’s reported $4.2bn-a-year media haul in football. But if you adjust for the ipl’s leaner season—74 matches, against 380 in the English Premier League—that makes it the second-most-lucrative sports series per game. Only the gladiatorial contests of America’s National Football League score higher (see chart). The bidders believe it is money well spent, for two main reasons. The first is the promise of advertising riches. Perhaps half a billion Indians watch at least some ipl, and millions tune in religiously. The tournament’s format, with play stopping every few minutes, is an adman’s dream. Last season’s broadcasts featured more than 110 different advertisers, from sellers of paan, More

Spiritual growth is an odd mandate for business schools preparing graduates to make manna in a secular world. One such institution, hec Paris, has nevertheless decided to send students on a trek through the French countryside to a remote village, where a Benedictine monk (a former lawyer) guides them through ethical dilemmas. Whether or not the three-day seminar represents a shift away from the profit-driven logic of business and towards a kinder, gentler form of capitalism is up for debate. But it shows that expectations for what makes a great mba programme—and, by extension, a great executive—are in flux.mba courses (our ranking of which you can find at economist.com/whichmba) used to focus on number-crunching and business strategy. Executives must still master these skills. Yet the corporate world has changed since the mba first became a rite of passage for high-powered executives. Management teams answer to a growing number of “stakeholders”, from employees to social activists, and face public scrutiny on their companies’ environmental, social and governance (esg) record. Simply creating shareholder value no longer cuts the mustard.One consequence of this trend is that running a modern business requires an ever-expanding list of credentials and competences. In addition to financial and digital literacy, strategic acumen and communication skills, executives are expected to be clued in on supply chains, climate science and much else besides. They must ensure that their workforces are diverse and inclusive. And as work life goes hybrid, mixing time in the office with home working, they are also asked to spend more time checking in on subordinates. Some of these new duties are delegated to new corporate roles. Prince Harry is the “chief impact officer” of a Silicon Valley firm. Clifford Chance, a law firm, has appointed a global “wellbeing and employee experience” chief. Nearly 5,000 people on LinkedIn, a social network, describe themselves as “chief happiness officers”. Still, most high-ranking managers will almost certainly need to perform each of these novel tasks to a greater or lesser extent. Since a day has 24 hours—and even hard-charging executives need sleep—their workload is changing. Devoting more time to employees and other stakeholders leaves corporate leaders less for other things, including mission-critical ones like coming up with a strategy for their firm. Since 2006 Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria of Harvard Business School have tracked what ceos do all day. They find that bosses spend 25% of their working lives on fostering relationships with insiders and outsiders, more than they devote to strategy (21%), corporate culture (16%), routine tasks (11%) and dealmaking (4%).Although Messrs Porter and Nohria do not yet have the relevant data, anecdotal evidence suggests that hybrid work may be skewing executives’ workday even more towards people management. Human-resources chiefs report that managers spend more time hand-holding staff, for example. Bosses were hybrid workers before covid-19. The pre-pandemic ceo spent around half their time in the office and the rest in external meetings, travelling or otherwise working remotely. More than a third of their communications was via video chat, email or the phone. The difference now is that everyone else spends just as little time in the office—if not less. This further reduces opportunities for face-to-face contact, which makes building relationships with employees more difficult, and almost certainly more time-consuming. As the 21st-century executive’s workload is changing, so too are mba curriculums. Many institutions are busily incorporating new, cuddlier modules. Harvard Business School now has one entitled “Reimagining capitalism”. insead, a French organisation, teaches students about “Business and society”. Plenty of mba programmes offer courses on interpersonal skills. Some are tailoring classes for the Zoom age, for example pointing out the common traps of virtual negotiations. That necessarily leaves less time for other, more traditional instruction. A few schools are even fundamentally rethinking their recruitment policies to reflect the evolving character of modern management. That may involve conducting group interviews to assess candidates’ soft skills rather than their intellect alone, or screening candidates for emotional traits such as empathy, motivation and resilience through questionnaires, letters or essays. Changes to whom business schools recruit, as well as to what they teach, may in turn affect who applies. Given that a business-school degree is designed in part to send a powerful signal of executive competence, that may determine what type of person rises up the corporate pecking order. It might not be your parents’ mba. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More