Upping the burger game

McDonald’s decided it’s had enough with dry patties and squishy buns. For the past seven years, the chain that made its name on burgers has been on a quest to improve its signature offering. The changes are now rolling out in the US, including on its Big Mac. The two all-beef patties are cooked in smaller batches for a more uniform sear. There’s more special sauce. The lettuce, cheese and pickles have been rethought to be fresher and meltier, and the bun is now a buttery brioche. The more than 50 tweaks on its burgers add up to the fast-food chain’s biggest upgrades in decades to its core menu. With increased competition in the burger market, executives decided to revamp some of the industrial-scale techniques that have produced cheap, uniform burgers. In some cases, McDonald’s is reviving practices it scrapped long ago in a push for efficiency.

(Adapted from “No More Dry Burgers: McDonald’s Overhauls Its Biggest Item,” by Heather Haddon, published on November 30, 2023, by The Wall Street Journal)

AI-enriched KPIs

To tackle the age-old challenge of aligning operations with core business strategy, savvy business leaders are using artificial intelligence to help use and develop key performance indicators. AI-enriched KPIs, known as smart KPIs, can better guide organisations toward key business goals. Smart KPIs paint a more detailed and accurate picture of what’s happening in the business: they provide predictive insights and situational awareness that can help organisations improve performance and foster better coordination among corporate functions. A global survey of more than 3,000 managers found that executives across industries are using AI to enhance how KPIs are prioritised, organised, and shared while also improving KPI accuracy and predictive capabilities. Survey respondents who said their company had used AI to prioritise KPIs were 4.3 times more likely to have seen improved alignment between functions than those who had not used AI.

(Adapted from “Build Better KPIs With Artificial Intelligence,” by Beth Stackpole, published on November 16, 2023, by MIT Sloan School of Management)

Heirs of billionaires

Ten-figure fortunes come mainly from inheritance, not from hard work. The “great wealth handover” is gaining momentum, with more than a thousand ageing billionaire entrepreneurs expected to bequeath $5.2tr to heirs in the coming two to three decades. For the first time in the history of UBS Group AG’s annual study of billionaires, new billionaires accumulated more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship. Some $151bn was inherited by 53 heirs in the year to April 6, versus the $141bn in fortunes of 84 new self-made billionaires. A self-made billionaire possesses the core business they built, where they will have become comfortable taking chances and dealing with inevitable failures. The heir almost certainly doesn’t have the same experience of taking risks, owning mistakes and starting again after setbacks.

(Adapted from “Billionaire Heirs Have A How-To-Spend-It Problem,” by Chris Hughes, published on December 3, 2023, by Bloomberg)

US’s treasury market

In 1790, America’s finances were in a precarious state: debt-servicing costs were higher than revenues and government bonds traded at 20 cents on the dollar. Alexander Hamilton, the country’s first treasury secretary, wanted a deep and liquid market for safe government debt. He understood the importance of investor confidence, so he proposed honouring all debts, including those of states, and offering to swap old debt, at par, for new bonds with a lower interest rate. “When the credit of a country is in any degree questionable, it never fails to give an extravagant premium, in one shape or another, upon all the loans it has occasion to make.” More than two centuries later, American politicians are busy undermining Hamilton’s principles. Debt-ceiling brinkmanship has pushed America towards a technical default. Rising interest rates and incontinent spending have seen debt balloon.

(Adapted from “Is The World’s Most Important Asset Market Broken?” published on December 3, 2023, by The Economist)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, December 11th, 2023