Christian is currently studying Economics and Chinese at Yale University, with a strong interest in business research, leadership education, and sustainable economic development. During his time at Yale, he has founded InspireYale (http://inspireyale.org), an organization that promotes creativity and programs on happiness at US universities. He is also a Board Member of the Yale Leadership Institute, where he supervises leadership education to undergraduate students, and the Outreach Director of China Hands (http://www.chinahandsmagazine.com), Yale's premier journal on US-China relations. Prior to university, Christian taught English in an orphanage in Pune, India, and worked in micro-finance in Chile. His professional experience also includes an internship at the IE Business School in Madrid, where he co-authored a case study on non-market strategy. Apart from his studies in economics and his research in business strategy, he is passionate about languages and speaks fluent Spanish, French, English, German, and has a good knowledge of Mandarin Chinese. In his free time, Christian enjoys running, dancing to soul and funk music, as well as reading about philosophy and development economics.
Lenovo is on its way to achieving its goal of becoming the No. 1 company in smart-connected devices: Today it reaches about 45 percent of the world’s population with its cellphones and sells more smartphones and tablets than PCs.
On Jan. 22, the World Economic Forum announced the launch of its Forum Academy. The idea is to put the WEF’s huge network of industry leaders and opinion-makers at the disposal of a global audience.
“Previously, it has been a get-together of businessmen. Today, it is a PR event.”
When it comes to the World Economic Forum and Davos, everyone already knows about the 2,500+ leaders and thinkers from around the world who invade the small ski resort city. But the city already receives another kind of visit a couple of days earlier, when hundreds of posters and ads are installed on buildings, buses, and windows around the city. Here is a selection of what we saw on just the day before the official events start:
A forward-looking company is radically changing the rules of the game in the financial industry. This is the view advanced by Lenddo, a social enterprise started in 2011 with the goal of economically empowering the middle class in developing countries. Founded by Jeff Stewart and Richard Eldridge, two businessmen who formerly worked in the financial and technology industries, Lenddo is based in Hong Kong and has a data science team in New York City. Despite a small staff of only 66, the company has grown to more than 380,000 members in the Philippines, Colombia and Mexico in the past two years. This extraordinary success is due to the company’s innovative online model.
Collective intelligence says that connecting people online can make them collectively act more intelligently than they previously did, as groups or individuals.
On September 8th, 2013, the Financial Times invited a rather special guest to write an op-ed. Li Keqiang, the Premier of China, described his vision for the nation’s future economic development. Li wrote that the country needs to carry out an important round of reforms, a follow-up to those started by Deng Xiaoping more than thirty years ago. Li’s set of reforms, often called “Likonomics” by Western observers, comprises various policies designed to sustain economic growth, notably through an opening-up of the private sector.