Philippa Kaur

Chief executives like to measure their worth in hard currency. One yardstick is their pay. Another is the market’s reaction when they move jobs. Howard Schultz has twice returned to the helm of Starbucks, the coffee giant he built up from a handful of trendy shops in Seattle. Shareholders greeted him cautiously both times. But they have given a rapturous welcome to Brian Niccol, the current boss of Chipotle Mexican Grill, a chain of canteen-like restaurants, who was named Starbucks’ next chief executive and chairman on August 13th. Since then, its market value has risen by $19bn (see chart), adding the equivalent of roughly ten Cheesecake Factories or one Domino’s Pizza. More

It is lonely at the top. So lonely, in fact, that sometimes American presidents and titans of industry have only one individual of similar stature to turn to: each other. Over almost two centuries they have played golf together, enjoyed movie nights and told jokes to each other. Some have developed genuine friendships; others have openly hated one another. It is an uneven relationship, of course. Though chief executives tend to stick around longer than presidents, there is no doubt who is higher in the pecking order. But rarely have any mogul’s dealings with presidents past, present and possibly future been as hard to fathom as those of Elon Musk, who once enjoyed the largesse of Barack Obama and is now cheerleader-in-chief for Donald Trump. More

What are companies for? Five years ago the Business Roundtable, a coven of American chief executives, overturned orthodoxy on this question. For decades company bosses had agreed that their mission was to make their shareholders richer. Doing good meant doing well. More precisely, it meant raising their firm’s share price. Such a narrow measure of success, it was argued, would keep managers focused and honest. More

Most news on China’s manufacturers is bad news for rivals around the world. Foreign governments fear their domestic champions will be pummelled by low-cost Chinese rivals. But on August 5th the world got a small reminder that China’s producers face big problems of their own. Hengchi, an electric-vehicle (EV) maker owned by Evergrande, a failed property developer, told investors that two of its subsidiaries had been forced into bankruptcy. The group originally aimed to sell 1m EVs a year by 2025; amid feverish competition it sold just 1,389 last year. More

When Tinder, a mobile dating app, launched on college campuses in America in 2012, it quickly became a hit. Although online dating had been around since Match.com, a website for lonely hearts, launched in 1995, it had long struggled to shed an image of desperation. But Tinder, by letting users sift through photos of countless potential dates with a simple swipe, made it easy and fun. More

I want to be successful. That person is successful. So that person can teach me how to be successful. This syllogism helps explain the torrent of podcasts, books and speeches devoted to the secrets of high performance. It is one reason why executive-leadership courses draw on case studies from well beyond business: politics, the army and even the Roman empire. And it has been much in evidence before and during the Olympics, which end in Paris on August 11th. More

Last month China’s government implemented the most sweeping reform to company law in the country since the changes that were made following its accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001. The new rules are creating yet another headache for Chinese companies grappling with overcapacity and a slowing domestic economy. For their part, China’s leaders are betting that the new law will make business in the country less volatile—and easier for the Communist Party to control. More

Amid the 286-page judgment, issued after nearly four years of trial proceedings and petabytes of evidence, four words stand out. “Google is a monopolist,” wrote Amit Mehta, the judge of a district court in America, adding that “it has acted as one.” His ruling, handed down on August 5th, could lead to big changes for the multi-billion-dollar search market—and for the wider tech industry. More