Why This Third-Generation CEO Says Risk Taking Is Essential |
When your family business is the Greatest Show on Earth, there is a lot of pressure to keep everything great—both for your family but also for audiences. Feld Entertainment has delighted families across the globe with popular shows including the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Monster Jam and Disney on Ice for more than 50 years. But it’s also a third-generation family business started in 1967 by Irvin Feld, and now run by his granddaughter Juliette Feld Grossman.
I talked to Grossman as the newest iteration of the Ringling Bros. Circus tour gathered momentum. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.
This is the published version of Forbes’ CEO newsletter, which offers the latest news for today’s and tomorrow’s business leaders and decision makers. Click here to get it delivered to your inbox every week.
Once again, economic indicators in the last week point to a future—and present—that is both bright and dismal. Annual core inflation in March, which captures the first full month of war in Iran, was 3.2%, up from 3% in February. Adding in more volatile food and fuel prices, headline inflation was 3.5%.
With inflation so far above the Federal Reserve’s preferred 2% margin, the board’s Open Market Committee voted last week to hold interest rates steady at between 3.5% and 3.75%. Last week’s meeting was the final one with Jerome Powell in the chair’s seat, though he said he will stay on as a member of the board of governors after his term expires on May 15, citing the threat of legal attacks and political interference with the Fed’s mandate.
Oil prices surged to their highest level since 2022 last week. On Thursday, Brent Crude futures hit $126 per barrel. Gas prices continued to climb last week, hitting a national average of about $4.46 a gallon this morning—about 35 cents more than a week ago—according to AAA.
However, the stock market also surged at the end of last week—buoyed by a report that GDP grew at 2% in Q1, a 57-year low in new unemployment benefit filings and good earnings reports from tech companies, including Alphabet and Meta. Odds of a recession this year dropped on both Kalshi and Polymarket in response—though neither the stock market nor prediction markets are complete indicators of how consumers feel about the economy going forward.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Success in AI is so vital that four in five global CEOs say their job is at risk if their AI transformation fails this year, according to a new study from Dataiku and The Harris Poll. A total of 87% said they would stake their job on AI results, and nearly two-thirds said their boards are actively applying pressure for those results.
Dataiku cofounder and CEO Florian Doutteau told me CEOs may have been oversold on AI........