The US has tech and France has luxury goods: The roots of French dominance lie in a luxury ecosystem that dates to the court of Louis XIV, and a culture of corporate raiding that began with Bernard Arnault. After gaining control of LVMH in 1989,… Read More
Sam Zell, the billionaire real estate investor, died this week at the age of 81. That seems young to me. Or maybe I’m just being overly optimistic about life expectancy. This is around the US average. Whatever the case, if you work in real estate,… Read More
The trend continues. BlackRock — the world’s largest asset manager with about 20,000 employees in more than 30 countries — announced today that employees need to be in the office at least 4 days a week starting this September. This is an increase from the… Read More
AI is going to be very disruptive, right? At this point, I think it is pretty clear to most that the answer is yes, almost regardless of what industry you’re in. But is it going to be really disruptive? Like disruptive in the Clayton Christensen… Read More
Rapid and high-volume decision making are fundamental to real estate development. In fact, it’s hard to think of anything being more important when it comes to executing on a project. This is not to say that being thoughtful and doing remarkable work aren’t important. You,… Read More
I went to bed last night watching President Biden’s address to the Canadian Parliament (full transcript, here.). And I woke up this morning to this Globe and Mail article about Canadian competitiveness. In it, Tony Keller talks about some of the things that are broken… Read More
Maybe it’s my design background or maybe it’s the extreme discomfort in my legs, but usually when I’m on a plane I can’t help but think about redesigning the cabin interior. Of course, there are only so many options in economy when your femur doesn’t… Read More
Tech analyst Benedict Evans — who has 175,000 subscribers to his weekly newsletter — has just published his big annual presentation about “what matters in tech?” This year’s is called “The New Gatekeepers.” And as is normally the case, he explores a number of macro… Read More
Big Ben Myers of Bullpen Consulting doesn’t usually have strong opinions on Twitter (obviously joking), but I did see him respond to this tweet this morning: The assertion he is responding to is basically this: “developers are stupid because they tend to hold onto land… Read More
Perhaps the greatest lesson from Warren Buffet’s most recent letter to Berkshire shareholders is that, to be wildly successful, you only have to be right sometimes: In 58 years of Berkshire management, most of my capital-allocation decisions have been no better than so-so. In some… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 