Business

The business advantages of scale and scope are widely recognized, but large, global enterprises often fail to fully realize them when it comes to innovation. Innovations that are developed in one geographic region or business unit — new products to delight customers, new HR policies to attract and retain talent, new production processes that drive efficiency gains — too often stay within them instead of being disseminated across the enterprise. Consider the experience of a global consumer packaged goods company, and three of its regional business units. (Innosight was an advisor to the company). Region 1 had developed a new brand targeted at younger consumers, who were increasingly seeking healthier products. Region 2 had changed its production processes in ways that in...

Comment on this storyCommentWhen President Biden signed his sprawling economic spending package into law last August, he heralded its massive investments in health care and climate change as an achievement that defied the odds.“The American people won, and the special interests lost,” Biden proclaimed at the time.Nearly a year later, though, his pronouncement appears in jeopardy: A growing roster of corporate and political foes has started to lay siege to the law known as the Inflation Reduction Act, hoping to erode some of its key provisions before they can take effect.The latest broadside arrived Friday, when the pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb — a maker of the popular blood-thinner Eliquis — sued the Biden administration over its forthcoming program to lower prescription drug...

Richard Severo, a prizewinning reporter for The New York Times whose challenge to what he considered a punitive transfer by the newspaper’s management became a cause célèbre among journalists in the 1980s, died on June 12 at his home in Balmville, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. He was 90.His wife, Emóke Edith de Papp, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Over his Times career, from 1968 to 2006, Mr. Severo won a coveted George Polk Award from Long Island University in 1975 for his reports that millions of gallons of milk produced by a New York State dairy farmers’ cooperative, one of the largest in the nation, had been watered down with powdered skim milk for more than five years while being sold as whole milk. He also won a Meyer “Mike” Berger Award from Columbia Universi...

For three decades, Crispin Odey stood above London’s financial community, a larger-than-life financial mogul who was known for taking huge bets — and raking in big profits when they proved right.But in a little more than a week, his hedge fund is suddenly on the brink of dissolution, felled by the latest accusations of sexual assault and harassment against its 64-year-old founder.The firm, Odey Asset Management, said on Thursday that it was in “advanced discussions” to transfer funds and staff to other firms. The reason, it noted with perhaps extreme understatement, was that it had “become clear that some investment management activities of the partnership are affected by recent events.”In a sign that investors were losing confidence in the company, Odey Asset Management said it would shu...