Philippa Kaur

Motivational quotes. Videos of Steve Jobs saying absolutely anything. Clips of a baby elephant being rescued from a river. You do not have to scroll for long on LinkedIn, a networking site ostensibly for people at work, to find “inspirational” content. There may be people who need only to read “We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are” written in a nice font to feel amped up on a Monday morning. But there will be just as many who want to snigger or vomit. For bosses interested in how to motivate the people around them, there are better options than searching for quotes by Paulo Coelho. More

TALK TO EUROPEAN bosses about their continent and the responses are as varied as the languages they speak. Katastrophe, bark the Germans. The Italians wave their hands in exasperation. The French offer a resigned Gallic shrug. The British change the subject to the weather (which isn’t exactly fabulous, either). With governments collapsing centre-left (in Germany last month) and centre-right (in France on December 4th), plus war raging in next-door Ukraine, chaos is the political watchword. More

Silicon Valley and the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, have a strained relationship. Regulators in Brussels blame American tech giants for everything from the struggles of European startups to teenage depression. American tech firms whinge that they are targeted by jealous Europeans. Now, after years of acrimony, a détente is possible. On December 1st a new commission took office. More

“We’ve got your back,” Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, told parents on November 29th, a day after pushing through some of the world’s strictest limits on screentime. One year from now, under-16s will be banned from using social media, in a move intended to protect them from harm. Teenagers groaned. Parents discreetly high-fived. Policymakers around the world took notes. More

For MORE than two years most Russian businesses carried on unscathed by the war in Ukraine. A surge in defence spending and subsidised loans for consumers and firms propped up spending at home, even as sanctions curtailed access to foreign markets and inflation jumped. Western companies from Volkswagen, a German carmaker, to Shell, a Dutch oil giant, sold their Russian operations to local enterprises. After an initial tumble, the MOEX, an index of Russian stocks, steadily recovered (see chart). More

In the weeks after Donald Trump’s sweeping election victory, American companies sought to reassure investors that they were amply prepared for a new round of tariffs. Some, like Stanley Black & Decker, a toolmaker, highlighted efforts to shift their supply chains away from China. Others, like Lowe’s, a home-improvement retailer, pointed to processes they have put in place to deal with tariffs after Mr Trump’s first term, during which levies were imposed on about $380bn-worth of imports ranging from steel and aluminium to washing machines, mostly from China. More

When Pat GELSINGER took over as Intel’s chief executive in 2021 he seemed to possess the same impatient mindset as his mentor, Andy Grove, a former boss of the chipmaker famed for declaring that “Only the paranoid survive”. Barely a month into the job Mr Gelsinger unveiled a plan to restructure the business and advance through five generations of production technology within four years. Nearly four years on, however, it is Intel’s investors who have grown impatient. On December 2nd Intel announced that Mr Gelsinger would be retiring. That his departure is effective immediately, with a permanent successor yet to be appointed, suggests it was hardly voluntary. It leaves both Intel and the incoming Trump administration in an awkward spot. More

The most popular musicians on Spotify this week included plenty of familiar names, from Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars to Billie Eilish. But also riding high in the streaming platform’s charts were some unexpected stars, including Jane Austen, J.R.R. Tolkien and Boris Johnson. More