Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

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Every day seems to bring more exciting news. First the drugs tackled diabetes. Then, with just an injection a week, they took on obesity. Now they are being found to treat cardiovascular and kidney disease, and are being tested for Alzheimer’s and addiction. It is early days yet, but glp-1 receptor agonists have all the makings of one of the most successful classes of drugs in history. As they become cheaper and easier to use, they promise to dramatically improve the lives of more than a billion people—with profound consequences for industry, the economy and society.

In the three years since semaglutide was approved for treating obesity, it has taken America by storm. After decades of disappointing “miracle cures”, these drugs work. Image-conscious influencers and well-heeled financiers are not their only users. Already one in eight American adults has been on glp-1 drugs. Novo Nordisk, maker of semaglutide, branded Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for weight loss, and Eli Lilly, which makes tirzepatide, a more effective alternative, have together added around $1trn in market value since 2021.

The action is now moving beyond America. With over two-fifths of the world overweight or obese, demand for glp-1 drugs is voracious. Pharma companies are racing to make them work as pills, which would be cheaper to produce than jabs, and to reduce their side-effects. Generic versions for older GLP-1 agonists are entering the market. Semaglutide is to come off patent in Brazil, China and India in 2026; eight such drugs are in the works in China. That is just as well. As incomes in the developing world have risen and life has become more sedentary, people’s waistlines are catching up with those in the West.

Curbing obesity would be consequential. Yet glp-1 drugs promise to do much more. Overweight patients on semaglutide have been found to suffer fewer heart attacks and strokes; the benefits, astonishingly, seem to be largely independent of how much weight is lost. Tirzepatide improves sleep apnoea. Trials show that glp-1 agonists reduce chronic kidney disease in diabetics; and there are signs they may lessen brain shrinkage and cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s. Studies of health records suggest that they may help with addictions, too; people already on glp-1 drugs in America were less likely to overdose on opioids or abuse cannabis or alcohol. Researchers are even talking, in hushed tones, of their anti-ageing effects.

For patients, the new uses of glp-1 drugs would mean not just longer, healthier and more productive lives, but happier ones, too. In a world of abundance people succumb to their impulses even if they know their behaviour is harmful in the long term. Although GLP-1 agonists may limit the pleasure of instant gratification, they promise to end intrusive cravings and improve long-term health.

Rather as the contraceptive pill encouraged women to stay in education and work, so GLP-1 drugs could lead to profound economic and social change by enhancing productivity and freedom. Some business models could be upended.  The GLP-1 revolution is just beginning. Its promise is tantalising.

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Certain industries create more value and have a greater impact than others. We call these outperformers arenas of competition. They are defined by two characteristics: high growth and high dynamism. Due to their growth, they capture an outsize share of the economy’s overall expansion; in terms of dynamism, market share within them changes hands to an outsize degree.

This report from the McKinsey Global Institute identifies 18 future arenas that could reshape the global economy between now and 2040.  To do so, the authors first analyze a data set of the world’s 3,000 largest companies from 2005 to 2020 and pinpoint 12 arenas of today, including biopharmaceuticals, cloud services, e-commerce, and electric vehicles. Arenas of today refers to the arenas that formed over the past two decades. The authors used 2005 to 2020 as their analytical interval to delineate a clean decade boundary and ensure consistent, well-established data. Extractive summary of the report is being shared in this weekly newsletter.

The report identifies a set of present and future arenas of competition, industries that could transform the business landscape and our world. Arenas are defined by high growth and high dynamism. These industries capture an outsize share of value growth, and market share within them shifts dramatically, as measured by the “shuffle rate,” a metric of company market share movements. These two characteristics signal a new era of competition and signify new technologies and business models in play.

The report identified 12 arenas of today: software, semiconductors, consumer internet, e-commerce, consumer electronics, biopharmaceuticals, industrial electronics, payments, video and audio entertainment, cloud services, electric vehicles (EVs), and information-enabled business services (ranked in order of 2020 market cap). “Arenas of today” refers to the arenas that formed over the past two decades. Understanding arenas is important for at least two reasons.  Not only are they where the business world is reshaped, but recognizing the elements that are usually present in an arena and that help explain its growth and dynamism allows us to identify a set of arenas that could plausibly emerge over the next 15 years. If the past is any guide, they will be centers of competition, innovation, and value creation.

Today’s arenas stand out from other industries in six ways:  they captured an increasing share of economic profit, attracted outsize levels of investment for innovation, enabled new entrants to grow, spawned giants, tended to be more concentrated, and were more global.

To identify future potential arenas, the authors examined how today’s arenas originated. They observed three elements that, when combined, were likely to result in high growth and high dynamism and to generate an arena. The three ingredients, which they call an “arena-creation potion,” are business model or technology step changes, escalation incentives for investments, and a large or growing addressable market. 

With these insights on existing arenas and their characteristics as a guide, the authors have identified 18 potential future arenas that together could yield $29 trillion to $48 trillion in revenues and $2 trillion to $6 trillion in profits by 2040. In terms of impact on the economy, we estimate that they could grow from about 4 percent of GDP in 2022 to 10 to 16 percent by 2040. This translates to a 18 to 34 percent share of total GDP growth.

The potential future arenas can be divided into three groups: arenas of today that are likely to continue developing into arenas of tomorrow (these include E-commerce, Electric Vehicles, Cloud services, Semi-conductors); second subsegments of current arenas that may grow sufficiently large and fast to become spin-off arenas (these comprise of AI software and services – spin-off from software, Digital ads – spin-off from consumer internet, and Streaming – spin-off from video and audio entertainment; and third emergent arenas that are not as closely linked as the potential spin-offs to any of today’s arenas (include Shared autonomous vehicles, space, cybersecurity, batteries, video games, robotics, Industrial and consumer biotechnology, Modular construction, Nuclear fission power plants, Future air mobility, and drugs for obesity and related conditions). While at different stages of their evolution, each displays early signs of the three arena-creation potion elements. 

The 18 arenas of tomorrow we have identified could be even more materially transformative than the 12 arenas of today, shaping how we consume and process data, approach health and wellness, and interact and communicate with one another. Recognizing how and when arenas originate, understanding how they evolve, and anticipating the way they could change society can offer a unique view of the arc of society’s progress.

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In April, the leading crypto exchange Binance announced that it had received approval to operate in Dubai, the biggest and wealthiest city in the United Arab Emirates. The license was one of the first granted by the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, a regulator created in 2022 by the Dubai government to supervise the growing crypto industry.

The green light was a major win for Binance, which was still rebuilding after the criminal conviction and imprisonment of its founder and former CEO, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, by the U.S. government in late 2023. It also reflected a developing strategy for the nascent regulator: attracting the world’s leading crypto companies to the Gulf emirate, even as other jurisdictions turn them away.

Interviews with Dubai’s regulators, venture investors, and entrepreneurs reveal a city that is establishing itself as a global crypto hub as the industry finds itself at a crossroads, with Dubai boasting a higher risk tolerance than its counterparts in the U.S. and Europe.

As other non-Western cities, from Singapore to Hong Kong, compete to attract blockchain businesses, Dubai hopes that its combination of clear regulations, ample capital, and unique “free zone” structure will set it apart from other competitors. As other governments like the Bahamas discovered with FTX, however, the downsides of inviting the often unruly crypto sector to set up shop can often outweigh the benefits.

The emirate has taken a novel approach to overseeing crypto by carving out a space for it within a special economic zone called the Dubai International Financial Centre, established in 2004 to attract foreign companies from banks to tech giants to set up operations in the budding economy. DIFC has its own court system and financial regulator, the Dubai Financial Services Authority, which began laying out plans to oversee crypto businesses in 2021. To date, DFSA has granted licenses to around 10 crypto firms, including Ripple.

As lawmakers in the U.S. continue to squabble over legislation, Dubai has signaled to the crypto industry that it is open for business, even if the embrace comes with growing pains.

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For large companies operating in mature sectors—such as Procter & Gamble in consumer goods, Apple in consumer electronics, and Adobe in cloud software—driving growth is a perennial challenge. Growth through acquisition is always an option, but many companies quickly find that the costs outweigh the benefits.

The only reliable path to maintaining market leadership is what is widely known as transformational innovation—major changes in products and services that redefine customers’ expectations by delivering significantly improved performance, providing new kinds of value, resolving long-standing trade-offs, and/or radically reducing manufacturing costs. Think P&G’s Tide Pods laundry detergent, the Apple iPod, and Adobe’s subscription software as a service.

But innovation of this type is not only difficult to envision; it is also extremely challenging to develop and scale up. Even companies that invest in R&D on transformational innovations often terminate projects with compelling value propositions during the expansion phase because they are reluctant to commit the necessary resources. Many that invest to scale up big-bet innovation projects do so only to see them fail.

Based on the experiences of Procter & Gamble and other big companies the authors shared a playbook for scaling up transformational innovation. It’s organized around four major challenges: providing sufficient leadership, building the right team, unlocking resources, and making big-bet decisions.

1. Providing Sufficient Leadership.  The leader of a business in which a transformational innovation is taking shape—typically the CEO or a business unit president (we’ll refer to this role as the CEO hereafter)—has a formidable responsibility: to manage the current business, which generates significant revenue and needs continual incremental innovation to hit short-term growth targets, while championing the transformational innovation that will lead to future growth, which requires large investments in resources and leadership attention. Unfortunately, many CEOs are biased toward focusing on the current business.  A quick scan of a typical CEO calendar supports this claim.  CEOs can carve out time for transformational efforts in three ways:  delegate operating decisions, articulate a purpose, and establish the right cadence for project stakeholder meetings.
2. Building the Right Team.  A CEO’s primary role in a transformational innovation is to partner with the senior R&D executive on the lead team to ensure that the organization gives the project the space and resources it needs to expand.  To give the team the expertise it needs, for example, to scale up a transformational innovation, the CEO should make two key appointments: the integration leader and the commercial leader.
3. Unlocking Resources.  Scaling up transformational innovations requires the whole organization to do substantially more work, typically with no increase in total resources. Two approaches are useful here: leveraging centralized sources of funding and staffing and finding ways to free up resources within the business unit.

Decision-making for transformational innovations requires projecting into an uncertain future. Business leaders need to agree on relevant measures that will dictate the decisions to scale up and launch. They must also avoid falling back on an overly cautious approach. The following can help:  focus on forward-looking metrics and know when to be bold.

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Profitably thriving through market disruptions demands that executives recognize that better decisions aren’t enough — they need better choices. Choices are the raw material of decision-making; without diverse, detailed, and high-quality options, even the best decision-making processes underperform. Traditional dashboards and scorecards defined by legacy accounting and compliance imperatives reliably measure progress but can’t generate the insights or foresight needed to create superior choices. They weren’t designed for that.

Generative AI and predictive systems are. They can surface hidden options, highlight overlooked interdependencies, and suggest novel pathways to success. These intelligent systems and agents don’t just support better decisions — they inspire them. As greater speed to market and adaptability rule, AI-enhanced measurement systems increasingly enable executives to better anticipate, adapt to, and outmaneuver the competition. The authors’ research offers compelling evidence that predictive and generative AI systems can be trained to provide better choices, not just better decisions. 

Leaders, managers, and associates at all levels can use intelligent systems — rooted in sophisticated data analysis, synthesis, and pattern recognition — to cocreate intelligent choice architectures that prompt better options that in turn lead to better decisions that deliver better outcomes. Coined by Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein in their book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the term choice architectures refers to the practice of influencing a choice by intentionally “organizing the context in which people make decisions.”

Translating AI-enabled measurement capabilities into actionable insights, nudges, and options effectively creates dynamic intelligent choice architectures. These structures embed AI insights into decision frameworks and flow; deliver choices that are personalized, predictive, and ethically aware; and help users align decisions with enterprise goals.

When weighing choice architecture options, leaders should explicitly consider how these systems would engage with users and connect them with the job or task for which they are best suited.  These are some options for intelligent choice architectures: should nudge algorithms for optimal decisions, can create personalized decision environments, create predictive choice modeling, AI can manage complexity, and can inform decision-making with ethical considerations.

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Have you noticed how quickly the professional landscape is shifting? Just look around — technology is evolving at breakneck speed, reshaping how we work.  72% of companies have adopted AI to enhance at least one area of their business, and interestingly, 16% of organizations function entirely in a remote capacity. These figures highlight how businesses are adapting to survive.  But awareness of these changes won’t cut it. To thrive in this ever-changing environment, you must embrace these transformations and adjust your skill set accordingly. To get started, let’s dive into the seven key skills you should focus on over the next decade to ensure your career not only keeps pace but leads the way.

1. Digital Literacy.  We live in a time where most processes and systems are performed and optimized digitally. Without the knowledge to operate these digital tools, it would be hard to adapt to the rapid pace by which they are improving. Being digitally literate gives you the ability to critically analyze and understand exactly how these tools work.
2. Data Analysis.  When you learn to make decisions based on given data, your choices become more objective and transparent. It is an important skill, especially when it comes to decisions related to your career. Data-driven decision-making means not letting bias or emotions affect your choices and the steps you take.  There are different tools to help with analyzing data. For example, Excel and Python.
3. Emotional Intelligence (EQ).   Hard skills aren’t the only skills you need; soft skills are essential, too, if you want to build a successful and long-lasting career. You need to learn to be a good leader, as well as a good team player. Having good emotional intelligence is also necessary as it enables you to understand and manage your own emotions, which, in turn, helps you understand and respond well to the feelings of others. This is crucial if you want to form strong interpersonal relationships and collaborate better with other people in the workplace.
4. Adaptability and Resilience.  With how quickly trends and demands can shift, you need to be adaptable if you want your career to thrive. Of course, success isn’t guaranteed and minor or major setbacks can happen, especially with how uncertain the industry can be. But it’s important to develop a mindset that lets you see those setbacks as an opportunity for growth instead of a personal failure. Resilience is essential for overcoming obstacles in the industry.
5. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving.  No matter your role in the industry, you will always encounter problems. It’s important to develop the critical thinking and problem-solving skills required to present effective solutions.
6. Cybersecurity Awareness.  The digital age does not come without its risks. The increased use of digital tools also means a rise in cyber threats. It’s important to be aware of these potential security threats and act accordingly to prevent any risks.   There are four principles in cybersecurity that you should know about. These principles are: protect, monitor, assess, and respond.
7. Remote Collaboration Skills.  Remote work has quickly blended into the norm right after the pandemic. Although it has its benefits, the tricky part of this setup is effectively collaborating with your coworkers. You should maintain constant communication and morale if you don’t want the team to fall apart.

Embrace Lifelong Learning To Stay Ahead In Your Career Journey.  Nothing in the industry is set in stone except for change. New discoveries, advancements, and trends are born every day, and the only way to stay ahead of the curve is to be willing to adapt. Lifelong learning is important not just for personal growth, but for career growth and stability as well.

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If your daily to-do list is longer than a CVS receipt, you might feel overwhelmed about how to get it all done. But figuring out how to manage your daily tasks is key for maximizing your effectiveness as CEO—and thus supporting the rest of your company. 

It’s no surprise that company leaders have a lot on their plates—and startup leaders might be especially overburdened.  But just filling up your day with meetings and living by what comes through your inbox isn’t a productive approach, says executive coach Leila Bulling Towne: “If what makes you feel like you’re contributing is, ‘My calendar is full and I’m in tons of meetings. I’m overbooked,’ then you are an ineffective CEO.”  Instead, here’s how Bulling Towne and other experts say you should intentionally manage your to-do list:  

1. Determine the “highest and best” use of your time.  Small-business CEOs have a tendency to think they can do everything themselves, says Maura Thomas, an expert on corporate productivity and time management. But as their companies grow, that belief becomes more and more unrealistic.  Thus, Thomas recommends that CEOs ask themselves a question: “What is the highest and best use of my time?” Or, in other words: “What won’t get done that needs to get done if I don’t do it?” 
2. Keep a “to-delegate” list.  Once you prioritize your own tasks, you need to delegate the other work to your team. This is the one major difference in the to-do list management of company leaders versus other contributors.
3. Find what works for you—and stick to it.  Some expert insights differ on the best way to keep a to-do list organized. For instance, some encourage leaders to keep separate personal and professional to-do lists others no it is not possible particularly for startup founders.

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Delegation in your business requires you to step back, and this is a very scary thing to do. Most of the entrepreneurs have the mentality that if they let go of our control, things will fall apart. Actually, it is the contrary. When you trust your team and give them the power to do something, they don’t just do the job; they grow, create and progress the company.  It’s all about empowering all employees to take responsibility for the company’s growth. Here is how you can make that leap with confidence — these five fail-proof approaches will revolutionize your team and leadership.

1. Shared ownership: Invest in the outcome, not just the task.  The moment your team feels they own the work, the game changes. They no longer think of the importance in terms of the tasks to be accomplished but the outcome of the tasks to be accomplished. This is not about doing more for them, of course — it is about doing more with them and empowering them to have more control over the final result.
2. Role clarity: Defining responsibilities to create freedom.  Uncertainty is never the ally of productivity. When roles and responsibilities are not defined, it becomes hard to avoid confusion, overlapping of duties and deadlines being missed. To avoid this, you must be very specific about who does what. This not only liberates you and your team from constant supervision — it also allows people to take responsibility without tripping over each other.
3. Self-sufficient systems: Let the work flow without you.  Your business should not need you at every step, at every process, at every decision-making point. On the contrary, the more you can afford not to be involved in the lower level of the team’s work, the better. To do this, you need to create systems — activities that work effectively without your direct engagement. Whether the process is a mechanical one or a set of checklists and protocols, these systems enable work to be executed smoothly without supervision.
4. Problem-solution mindset: Solutions, not just problems.  The worst thing that your team can do to a business is to present problems without offering any solutions. To trust your team and let go, you have to cultivate a problem-solution mindset. This means moving the culture from just pointing out problems to also suggesting solutions. When your team brings solutions rather than problems, they are demonstrating to you that they have considered the issue and want to fix it.
5. Accountability loops: Build feedback systems that run themselves.  Accountability does not equal pressuring someone. Rather, it is about creating structures within which people can report on their performance and are accountable for it. Accountability loops are frameworks that help your team maintain self-organization, correct mistakes and stay motivated without micromanagement. When accountability loops are established, there is no need to ask whether the job is being done or the deadlines are being met. Your team is fairly autonomous, and you can work on other strategic areas of the company.