Boston Globe (September 8)
The shift to online learning has been filled with challenges and pitfalls. For professors, “reinvention has meant reworking syllabuses, prerecording lectures, and reconsidering how to test students’ knowledge of material – and even how to bond with them virtually.” The universities want “to avoid a repeat of last spring, when disgruntled parents and students filed lawsuits claiming the online learning experience was not worth the thousands of dollars in tuition costs.” Meanwhile, one survey showed that roughly half of the students “feel that higher education is no longer worth the cost, and 40 percent believe it’s a bad deal now that It has moved online.”
Tags: Challenges, Disgruntled, Lawsuits, Online learning, Parents, Pitfalls, Professors, Reinvention, Students, Tuition, Universities
Wall Street Journal (May 15)
“It is always hard anticipating successful drugs, but those wagering on coronavirus treatments face unique challenges. Some of the most innovative and promising approaches are wholly unproven. Companies are competing with foreign nations and not-for-profit organizations determined to achieve their own breakthroughs. Successful drugs or vaccines may run into pricing, manufacturing and distribution difficulties.” Issues like these explain why “big investors aren’t betting it all on a coronavirus cure.”
Tags: Breakthroughs, Challenges, Coronavirus, Distribution, Drugs, Innovative, Manufacturing, NPOs, Pricing, Unproven, Vaccines
Chicago Tribune (May 15)
The Coronavirus presents major challenges—a “wrecked economy, less office space demand, scarce financing”—to Chicago’s megadevelopments, calling in question whether many “can continue, if they’ll be pushed into the next construction cycle, or worse, go the way of the never-built Chicago Spire and Miglin-Beitler Skyneedle.”
Tags: Challenges, Chicago, Chicago Spire, Construction cycle, Coronavirus, Demand, Economy, Financing, Megadevelopments, Miglin-Beitler Skyneedle, Office space, Wrecked
New York Times (April 28)
“Delaying the Tokyo Games by a year already poses enormous economic, political and logistical challenges, including whether Japan can hope to recoup its $10 billion investment.” Without a vaccine, however, a 2021 “timeline may be optimistic.”
Tags: Challenges, Delay, Economic, Investment, Japan, Logistical, Optimistic, Political, Recoup, Timeline, Tokyo, Vaccine
Barron’s (December 27)
“Megatrends, like aging and climate change, are forcing governments to take care of themselves, understanding there are going to be massive challenges. As a result, we’re starting to see the peak of globalization, meaning limits to the movement of free capital, goods, money, services, and knowledge.”
Tags: Aging, Capital, Challenges, Climate change, Globalization, Goods, Governments, Knowledge, Limits, Megatrends, Money, Peak, Services
Financial Times (February 12)
“One of the challenges faced by Tokyo as it prepares for the Olympics is living up to the last time it hosted the games, in 1964. The challenge is not practical (the games will in all likelihood run like clockwork) but thematic…. Today’s construction boom in central Tokyo… is being pitched as the renaissance of a city that has been straining for 30 years to pull off a second comeback.”
Tags: 1964, Challenges, Clockwork, Comeback, Construction boom, Olympics, Renaissance, Tokyo
The Straits Times (February 20)
“In spite of a substantial budget surplus,” Singapore is planning to raise taxes to meet “the challenges that lie ahead—in the form of financing healthcare in an ageing society, meeting infrastructure needs and ensuring security.” This approach starkly contrasts with the U.S., which has cut taxes despite running an enormous budget deficit, but fiscal sustainability has been “a mainstay of Singapore’s economic planning since independence.”
Tags: Budget surplus, Challenges, Deficit, Economic planning, Fiscal sustainability, Healthcare, Independence, Infrastructure, Security, Singapore, Taxes, U.S.
Institutional Investor (February 14)
“Record-high fundraising has resulted in some growing pains and new challenges for private market managers.” In 2017, “fund managers raised a record sum of nearly $750 billion. Much of this fundraising was driven by so-called mega funds, or funds larger than $5 billion,” which more than doubled their take over 2016. According to McKinsey & Co., the largest firms are now increasingly challenged by where to deploy capital, rather than how to raise it. Maintaining “the persistency of firm performance” is also growing more challenging “as the biggest firms get bigger.”
Tags: Capital, Challenges, Fundraising, McKinsey, Mega funds, Performance, Record high
Wall Street Journal (July 5)
“The bosses of America’s biggest and best-known companies are learning a common lesson this year: The pay is great, but job security has rarely been shakier.” During the first five months of 2017, CEO turnover at large companies more than doubled. The “churn reflects a broader reality for the country’s business elite: An array of challenges—from increasing impatience on Wall Street and in boardrooms to a corporate landscape rapidly transformed by new technologies and rival upstarts—have made the top job tougher and more precarious than just a few years ago.” Today, “even the biggest companies are vulnerable to shareholder disapproval and competitive forces that their size and stature once helped them fend off.”
Tags: Boardrooms, CEO, Challenges, Elite, Impatience, Job security, Pay, Shareholders, Technologies, Turnover, U.S., Upstarts, Wall Street
Korea Times (May 9)
“Moon Jae-in of the largest Democratic Party of Korea couldn’t take office as president in more trying times ― the country is besieged by big challenges from within and without.” To succeed, he “should ditch partisan politics” and “adopt partnership governance.”
Tags: Besieged, Challenges, Korea, Moon, Partnership, Politics, President, Trying times
