Fewer than one in seven of Europe’s primary teachers is a man. Governments want to recruit many more of them, but fail to find them. In April of last year, while what often appeared to be the whole of the United Kingdom, or the part of it with a Netflix subscription at least, wa … | Continue reading
The Last Word: When competitiveness is beginning to slip, asking people to work harder can actually look suspiciously like moving backwards. Germany has spent much of the past few decades as shorthand for industrial discipline: excellent engineering, productive factories and an e … | Continue reading
Net zero began as a description of the planet’s carbon budget. It now describes jobs, buildings, and growth, and means less with every year. Net zero. It’s a phrase that has become popular to the point of being overused and, perhaps, losing any real meaning. It can stand alone, o … | Continue reading
OpenAI is putting ads in ChatGPT and Anthropic will not touch them. It is hardly a reinvention, yet ads never stopped anyone using Google. Artificial intelligence is a powerhouse of reinvention, or so we’ve been told. AI is reinventing drug discovery, the battery, the operating … | Continue reading
What happens when leaders drop the questioner. The initiative had a name, a budget and a room of nodding executives. Then someone asked what happens to the data in year three. By the next meeting, that person was not on the invitation list. That meeting is a composite. The sequen … | Continue reading
After Iceland’s European Union referendum, the bloc’s next big enlargement test lies on the Adriatic, where delay carries a strategic cost. Iceland’s rejection of renewed EU accession talks will not push the country out of Europe. Iceland already belongs to the European Economic … | Continue reading
A competitive Africa requires functional institutions and modern technology. Not just declarations of intent, but implementation capacity. Africa trades as much as East Asia relative to GDP but without the structural transformation. The problem lies not just in the volume of trad … | Continue reading
Reykjavik wants the market without the politics. So do Europe’s wealthiest hold-outs, and Britain, above all, ought to be paying attention. So Iceland will not be joining the European Union anytime soon. Voters on the North Atlantic island decided against resuming accession talks … | Continue reading
Sold as a cure for everything, AI is too often a solution bought before the problem is found. Firms are now paying hard to undo the mistake. We’ll fix it with AI. Get AI to do it. AI can do that. One day, those phrases may be true, but right now they look a great […] A solution i … | Continue reading
Jargon is worn like a flashy label, by the people the least sure they belong. Why the clearest bosses reach for the smallest possible words. Bridges, corridors, gateways, nodes, clusters, springboards, launchpads, powerhouses. Paradigms, verticals, deep dives, deliverables, headw … | Continue reading
The Last Word: Technology will force us to make it clear where perfection genuinely creates value and where it simply removes uniqueness. When I travel, I often want to bring something back that actually belongs to the place I have visited. Not necessarily something expensive o … | Continue reading
Airlines are dividing their cabins into an increasingly wide array of often confusing options. Do you fly Business Light or Premium Economy? It used to be so simple. Aeroplane cabins were divided into economy and business class, with an additional first class section on some rout … | Continue reading
Russia’s election fools nobody, which is rather the point. It also hands Putin a stick with which to beat a Ukraine that cannot vote at all. Oh the suspense. Russia will hold a parliamentary election in less than a month’s time, but the only political party in the country that op … | Continue reading
Reform politicians often cite Singapore as a low-tax, small-state model. Many of the city-state’s policies would suit a Green much better. Conservative politicians in Western Europe rarely miss an opportunity to invoke the small Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore as a para … | Continue reading
For Generation Z, spending less, not more, has become the ultimate flex. The second-hand trade is booming; the luxury trade, rather less so. If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Not anymore, it seems, especially when it comes to money. There are plenty of reasons that explain the unstopp … | Continue reading
The first thirty-five years of CEE capitalism were about creating wealth. The next thirty-five will reveal whether we can perpetuate it. Central and Eastern Europe has spent three and a half decades learning capitalism. The next challenge may be learning dynasty. I use the word c … | Continue reading
Expansion into jet fuel and crude oil trading added to the company’s increasingly diverse commodities offer. International commodities trader Alkagesta this week announced record results for the first half of 2026. The news reflected continued growth in trading volumes, expansion … | Continue reading
The Polish city’s experiment shows what a single location can manage on its own. Can a pilot in one Polish city offer a model for closing the loop on waste across Central and Eastern Europe? In Gdynia, that question is being tested in practice, at a time when the European Commiss … | Continue reading
Two-fifths of the world’s land is degrading. The COP charged with halting it sits in Mongolia this month, starved of money and of attention. Think COP, think climate change, climate catastrophe, and the largely talking shop that is the annual United Nations summit where nearly 20 … | Continue reading
The taxi trade rarely answers ride-hailing with a better cab. Where it can, it answers with the statute book, and calls it fair competition. There are plenty of things that make any arrival in a new city far more annoying than it should be. An inefficient airport that takes hours … | Continue reading
Firms that document every role and keep the notes current gain resilience. Nobody, up to and including the chief, should be irreplaceable. Warren Buffett told Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholders in May 2025 that he would hand over as chief executive at the year’s end, and on Janu … | Continue reading
The Last Word: Vitality can tell you if an organisation has life enough to grow, but only reinvention can explain how that life is renewed. A company can look healthy while becoming less relevant. Revenue is coming in, margins are holding and the strategy still makes sense. Yet B … | Continue reading
The city that abolished outdoor advertising is having second thoughts. Two decades on, the admen it banished have found their way back in. Walking around São Paulo for the first time, very little looks out of place. Certainly, there are few signs that the city has, for the past t … | Continue reading
Set the bar honestly and it can be cleared with ease. Create unrealistic expectations however, and prepare to see people left disappointed. Edith Piaf allegedly had a simple piece of advice for anyone wanting to become famous. “Use your faults, use your defects,” she is meant to … | Continue reading
Türkiye might not want to join the EU at the moment, but it would certainly like a lot more out of its current relationship with Brussels. During the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign, Boris Johnson, who would later become the UK’s prime minister, made great play of the fact that T … | Continue reading
Bulgaria’s fourth-largest city will be a fabulous host of next year’s 71st Eurovision Song Contest. The many naysayers need to get a grip. Be it boycotts over Israel’s participation, smaller countries not being able to afford the hefty entry fee, rows over voting, costume malfunc … | Continue reading
Post-Brexit, millions of young Europeans want an English-taught degree. Central and Eastern Europe’s universities have been slow to compete. In the often fierce but ultimately fatuous argument over just what university degrees are ‘worthy’ (usually restricted to science and maths … | Continue reading
Building infrastructure is a game for giants. Keeping it running, especially the clean-energy grid, is where nimble start-ups now break in. As anyone who has driven over a pothole, struggled to get through airport security, seen trains delayed, or suffered a power outage will not … | Continue reading
Nadya Zhexembayeva began discussing the need for Chief Reinvention Officers in 2015. A decade on, reinvention is more relevant than ever. Nadya Zhexembayeva was 14 when she took a job selling insurance in a country that had never had any. The Soviet Union was coming apart, Almaty … | Continue reading
The Last Word: The hard test for companies is finding out whether or not they’re willing to stop pretending while they still have a choice. This week, I read a post about why start-ups fail that stopped me on two lines: ‘Long before the cash ran out, before the announcement, bef … | Continue reading
The shrinking Danube looks like drought. But draining its wetlands and floodplains left the region far less able to weather what comes next. The exceptionally low water levels of the Danube have caused major disruption across the region, dominating headlines over the past week. V … | Continue reading
Investment funds launch all the time with much fanfare and almost no money behind them. A few pull it off, the rest simply run out of road. I’ve never met Sabrina Carpenter, and I doubt very much that she is even aware of my existence. Declaring, then, that I intend to court and … | Continue reading
Each of the six Western Balkan economies has found its own tech and innovation niche, and together they add up to far more than the parts. Branko Milutinović and a handful of fellow Microsoft alumni founded Nordeus in Belgrade in 2010; their football game, Top Eleven, has since s … | Continue reading
Too many firms say too much about too little and miss the news that counts. In a hollowed-out media, the press release is overdue a rethink. “If you’ve got nothing to say, say nothing.” Not my words, but those of the inimitable Right Honourable Jim Hacker, the fictional prime min … | Continue reading
The AI governance gap in IBM’s 2026 Cost of a Data Breach report. Two-thirds of the organisations in IBM’s 2026 breach study had no AI governance policy in place. Of that 68 per cent, 35 per cent reported no policy at all and 33 per cent said one remained in development. The find … | Continue reading
Immigrants increasingly back the parties that would have kept them out. The latest arrivals, it seems, are keenest to pull up the ladder. Backed by the hard-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), George Simion (pictured above) topped the first round of Romania’s re-run … | Continue reading
Too many states greet every unicorn as a national triumph. However, the louder a country cheers a start-up, the smaller it starts to sound. There’s no doubt that possessing one of the world’s smartest and most advanced systems of digital public services helped put Estonia, by no … | Continue reading
Cheap solar and a great wall of EU cash turned the bloc’s poorest member into its battery champion. Its neighbours are left buying power in. Few countries have witnessed more political upheaval in recent years than Bulgaria, which held no fewer than eight parliamentary elections … | Continue reading
The Last Word: Bogotá shows that urban resilience works only when housing, transport, water, and public spaces are redesigned together. Last week, I argued that the smartest city begins with shade. The point was not that trees are a substitute for technology, nor that every u … | Continue reading
As online users increasingly put questions to AI, not Google, publishers and businesses built on referral traffic are paying the dearest. Google became a verb in 1998 (mainly through informal use), was named the ‘most useful word’ in 2002, and was officially added to most major … | Continue reading
From catching up to shaping Europe: Five strategic resets, and a 5C Framework for winning the Second Age of Leadership in emerging Europe. For thirty years, Central and Eastern Europe’s defining ambition was to catch up with the West. That project succeeded—and, in succeeding, m … | Continue reading
Romania’s stock market is small, unfashionable and, over the past decade, the best-performing in the world. Almost no Romanians own a share. There is, of course, no such thing as free money, but investors on Romania’s stock exchange might argue that they are currently on to the n … | Continue reading
The Last Word: Urban intelligence gives us the capacity to redesign daily life before a changing, warming climate makes cities unliveable. On July 23, weather stations across Alicante province, where I had a chance to spend a couple of months this spring, recorded dew points clo … | Continue reading
A brutal July sell-off in AI chip shares has caught out many retail investors. Whether prices return to their highs is the loudest question. Mark Zuckerberg did not buy or sell a single chip, yet on July 1 his company set off the sharpest fall in semiconductor shares in years. Bl … | Continue reading
Football needs no reinvention. FIFA, the non-profit that runs it, has decided to put a fifth of its commercial heart up for sale regardless. The three-minute hydration breaks at the recent FIFA World Cup, ostensibly introduced to allow players to take on water during matches but … | Continue reading
A struggling firm reaches for artificial intelligence as it once reached for innovation. Neither saves a business the sums no longer favour. Lip-Bu Tan took charge of Intel in March 2025 and started cutting almost at once. His predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, had shed around 15,000 jo … | Continue reading
Ukrainian drones have choked Kazakhstan’s main oil route through Russia. Romania is most exposed, and Astana is now hedging each bet it has. Kassym-Jomart Tokayev picked his moment. On July 25, seated beside Vladimir Putin at a forum in the Siberian city of Omsk, Kazakhstan’s pre … | Continue reading
A record shortage of truck drivers is now throttling the world’s trade, and this time it will not fix itself when the economy turns. Umberto de Pretto, who runs the International Road Transport Union (IRU), delivered a grim tally this year: 2.9 million lorry-driving jobs standing … | Continue reading