Who is the most important person in your company? | Generative AI 'misuse' worries CTOs the most | Meta planning ad-free subscription or tracking ads 'choice' in EU, per WSJ -- in latest bid to keep snooping | TechCrunch | Communist rappers are luring young disgruntled Chinese

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� � � � � � Who is the most important person in your company? - The Economist    Questions are usually more interesting than answers. If you had to identify the most important person in your organisation, there is an obvious answer, a trite-and-untrue answer and a wrong-but-useful answer. The obvious answer is “the chief executive”. No cheese is bigger, no dog is more top. The most important decisions about the long-term direction of a company lie with the CEO; the hardest calls land on their desk; and the biggest pay cheques head their way. A board of directors might control their fate but no one wields more power. That is especially true of a startup: up to a certain point in its history, founders are the company. The trite answer to the same question is “the customer”. This is the kind of thing someone delivering a TED talk would say, after a suitably meaningful pause. It is the kind of thing that people in the audience would nod wisely at. An analysis of earnings-call transcripts of S&P 500 firms by Nandil Bhatia and Stephan Meier of Columbia Business School finds that executives talk about customers ten times more than they do about employees. Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Generative AI 'misuse' worries CTOs the most - Fortune    The Fortune CEO Initiative’s annual meeting gets underway this morning in Washington, D.C. (which, thankfully, remains open for business.) This is our community of CEOs who meet regularly to share ideas and best practices for maximizing their companies’ positive impact on society. Over the last seven years, they have been a force for change in business, driving the push for CEOs to step up on climate, diversity and inclusion, mobility, inequality, and more. This year, however, the gathering occurs in the midst of a political backlash, as well as corporate backsliding. I expect that to be a central part of our conversation today. Technology also will be on the agenda, as it has been since the Initiative’s founding. Members agree that technology is neither good nor bad. But how you use it and what rules govern its use can make a world of difference. On the agenda tomorrow are government officials including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), as well as top CEOs including Accenture’s Julie Sweet, IBM’s Arvind Krishna, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, Sanofi’s Paul Hudson, J&J’s Joaquin Duato, and ex-Merck CEO Ken Frazier. I’ll be reporting back here tomorrow. Continued here � � � � � � Meta planning ad-free subscription or tracking ads 'choice' in EU, per WSJ -- in latest bid to keep snooping | TechCrunch - TechCrunch    New battle lines appear to be being drawn up in the European Union between Facebook and Instagram owner Meta and regional users’ privacy rights. As it stands, the tech giant is running ads unlawfully in the EU since they target users by tracking and profiling their activity without a valid legal basis. This follows a landmark ruling by the bloc’s top court this summer denying its ability to claim a legitimate interest for this type of personal data processing; and a major decision in January by privacy regulators which found the company cannot claim contractual necessity either. That leaves consent. And consent under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) must be informed, specific and freely given. However freely given hasn’t always been interpreted to mean free, as in gratis — thanks to a push by certain news publishers to put up content paywalls that ask users to subscribe to their journalism or accept tracking ads. Continued here � � � � � � Communist rappers are luring young disgruntled Chinese - The Economist    TO MARK CHINA’S National Day on October 1st, the Communist Youth League sent a message to its nearly 18m followers on Weibo, a microblog platform. “Today, as protagonists of this era, we will write new legends on this sacred land!” it urged. Attached was a music video, its lyrics suffused with similar patriotic rhetoric and interspersed with clips of speeches by Mao Zedong and the country’s current leader, Xi Jinping. So far, so predictable. The surprise was the singer and his style: a rapper whose early songs about drugs and violence were deemed unfit for public airing. GAI, as he is known, has turned a new leaf. He is now the league’s MC. The Communist Party’s youth wing is a vast organisation that plays a big role in China’s political life. It indoctrinates people aged between 14 and 28 in the party’s ideology, provides a training ground for potential party members and helps the party to identify talent that can be groomed for high office. It also has an outward-facing task: spreading the party’s message among young people with no political ties. After he assumed power in 2012, Mr Xi clearly worried that the league was not up to the job. Officials admitted that it had become out of touch with young Chinese. For the party, China’s youth are a growing problem. The economy is stagnating, unemployment is rife among the young and housing costs are sky-high. Late last year small youth-led protests broke out in several cities. They were aimed at Mr Xi’s draconian “zero-covid” regime (subsequently abandoned). With extraordinary bravery, a few demonstrators even called on Mr Xi to step down. He will be mindful of the pro-democracy turmoil of 1989, when some of the league’s cadres joined the protesters. That period of upheaval across the communist world haunts Mr Xi. He often harks back to the Soviet Union’s collapse, which he blames on a breakdown in ideological orthodoxy and discipline. “It doesn’t matter if the Communist Youth League makes a thousand mistakes,” he said in 2015, quoting Deng Xiaoping. “But one mistake it cannot make is to deviate from the party’s track.” Continued here

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