Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, have been around in various forms for decades, but during the past two years they''ve taken off in the United States. In 2019, 59 were created, with $13 billion invested; in 2020, 247 were created, with $80 billion invested; and in the first quarter of 2021 alone, 295 were created, with $96 billion invested. In 2020, SPACs accounted for more than 50% of new publicly listed U.S. companies. SPACs .....more

Chicanery is common in the start-up world: With so much at stake, founders are apt to exaggerate, obfuscate, and otherwise stretch the truth when courting investors and other important stakeholders. Such deception locks up resources by prolonging the life of doomed ventures and makes it hard for VCs and employees to know where best to invest their money or labor. It also exacts a personal toll on founders themselves. The authors take a multidisciplinary .....more

The former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, whose life journey began in a Manhattan tenement, is an outspoken champion of inclusive capitalism and racial equity--themes that animate her just-published memoir, "Where You Are Is Not Who You Are." In this conversation with HBR''s editor in chief, she talks about good leadership in a multistakeholder world, income inequality, battling an activist investor, how being both Black and female affected .....more

Brain scans are showing us in new detail exactly what entices readers. Scientists can see a group of midbrain neurons--the "reward circuit"--light up as people respond to everything from a simple metaphor to an unexpected story twist. The big takeaway? Whether you''re crafting an email to a colleague or an important report for the board, you can write in a way that delights readers on a primal level, releasing pleasure chemicals .....more

The former top editor of the Boston Globe and the Washington Post talks about the Globe''s investigation of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, attacks on the Post by President Trump, truth as a casualty of political polarization, and more.

In 2019, after completing her postgraduate work in dentistry in Mangalore, India, an entrepreneur decided to set up a chain of clinics in Bengaluru, in the Indian state of Karnataka. She was not considering any partnerships for her venture, which she planned to fund with personal capital and a bank loan. The entrepreneur consulted her long-time friend, an independent business consultant, who introduced her to the manager of the Indian government-owned .....more

On March 19, 2020, as Covid-19 swept across the world, Bourla challenged everyone at Pfizer and its partner BioNTech--a German company focused on cancer immunotherapies--to "make the impossible possible": develop a vaccine more quickly than anyone ever had before, ideally within six months and certainly before the end of the year. Less than eight months later, on Sunday, November 8, they discovered that they had succeeded: Their combined .....more

This package begins with "What the West Gets Wrong About China," by Rana Mitter and Elsbeth Johnson, which discusses three fundamental misconceptions: that economics and democracy are two sides of the same coin; that authoritarian political systems can''t be legitimate; and that the Chinese live, work, and invest like Westerners. "The Strategic Challenges of Decoupling," by J. Stewart Black and Allen J. Morrison, contains .....more

When researchers from Cass Business School compared data on board diversity with fines levied for misconduct, they found that banks with more female directors were fined less often and less significantly.

Set in April 2020, the case talks about TAIGER, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company providing natural language processing (NLP) solutions in a rapidly growing market where demand and competition for such solutions are high. TAIGER solutions could process and digitise large amounts of physical data, perform search and extract functions on data, and make appropriate recommendations. The algorithms and tools were bundled under three packages, and .....more