PodCast

About PodCast

The SWISSUES Podcast is an edited recording of the fortnightly Forvm discussion. www.swissues.com (https://www.swissues.com/s/swissues-podcast?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

SWISSUES

Category

business · education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Jul 2024

Latest episode

5 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

2 of 44 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   5 Oct 2026

   Life-Cycles in Business

   This article was created from a Forvm event, Life-Cycles, on 30th September, 2026, and featured in the embedded podcast. What counts as a life cycle The term is applied loosely. Many consultancy diagrams show a process that loops back to the start once the work is done, which is a repeating process rather than a life cycle. A true life cycle has a distinct end, even if something else takes over afterwards: a product replaced, a company absorbed or closed. Whether the cycle is visible also depends on the viewpoint. From inside, a life looks like a straight line from birth to death; from far enough above, the parts are reused and the pattern repeats. A life cycle is also never isolated, because it sits within systems that interact with it. Companies: act your age, or look ahead? One view is that a company should act its age: once mature, it should return cash to shareholders and let its assets and people be used elsewhere. Philips is the usual example, and it can be read two ways. One reading is that it was a mistake. Its engineers developed lithography technology that the company judged to be outside its interests, and that technology became ASML, now worth far more than Philips itself. The other is that letting go was the right course: the assets went to work elsewhere, and shareholders were spared a management looking for new ventures to justify its own survival. The record is more mixed than either reading. Philips did not simply drop these ventures. ASML began in 1984 as a joint venture with ASM International, and Philips was the largest founding investor in TSMC, supplying capital, technology licences and its first chief executive. Both were set up at arm’s length, with partners and a minority stake, which may be the way to encourage a new business without smothering it. Philips later sold both holdings. That bears on a common failing: large firms tend to be poor at nurturing small ones, because they run them by the rules suited to large, capital-heavy operations. The same question applied to a chemical company that set out to break its boom-and-bust cycle, came close to bankruptcy through an execution error, and then recovered. The strategy may have been sound, but the recovery looked better for management than for shareholders, who could have moved their money elsewhere. Whether shareholder value should be the yardstick at all was also questioned. A more practical suggestion was that large organisations hold several life cycles at once and need different people for each. The people who run mature plants are not necessarily the ones who should start new ventures. Decisions to exit a market are better made case by case than by doctrine. Products and technologies Pharmaceutical products follow a fixed path from discovery through development and patent protection to generic competition, so the company must keep finding something new that others cannot copy. Technologies also shift underneath, from small molecules to proteins to genetic engineering, and firms like Nokia show the cost of missing the next one. Decline is not always accepted. One agrochemical product is still sold fifty years after patenting, and an old beer brand regained value by being made scarce and more expensive. Others drop a product on a rational view of the market. Stage also changes the skills needed: launch and growth call for different people than maturity, where cost and defending against decline dominate. A parable about the wheel illustrates this. Once a technology simply works, buyers care about range and colour, which is why new phones seem to be announced mainly through new colours. Imposed life cycles Some cycles come from outside the market. Patent expiry is a deliberate regulatory cycle, intended to keep medicines affordable while rewarding innovation. The planned end of combustion-engine sales spurred investment in electric cars, and the phase-out of CFCs produced replacement chemicals and, apparently, a recovering ozone layer. Management fashion produces a third kind: periods favouring divestment, then vertical integration, with little rationale beyond the trend. Misaligned cycles and inertia For procurement, the problem is rarely one cycle but the mismatch between several. A mature buyer, a young supplier and an experimental technology may all sit under a contract of five to ten years. Procurement also sees technologies moving faster in the market than inside its own organisation, which makes its warnings unwelcome but valuable. Finally, there was the suggestion that human laziness and attachment to comfort drive much of this. Organisations and sourcing relationships settle into habit. Deliberately ending something can shake that loose, though such experiments sometimes fail. Participants in the SWISSUES Forvm event on which this article is based were Armin Scharlach, Pramod Prasanth, Stephen Fulton, Ercan Solmaz, Halyna Yokovleva and Bill Young. The article is edited with assistance from Anthropic’s Claude LLM. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.swissues.com (https://www.swissues.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   12 Sept 2026

   SWISSUES on Managerialism

   The session opened with a working definition of managerialism as habit rather than judgement: organisations doing things because the tools and routines are there, not because the situation calls for them — the beaver building a dam at the sound of running water. Several other framings were offered alongside it: prioritising the institution’s survival and status over its purpose; an early resort to tools, techniques, and efficiency; prioritising inputs over outputs. The group was invited to argue for, against, or around all of these. Managerialism vs leadership Much of the hour circled a single distinction, approached from several angles: Skills vs title. Being called a manager is increasingly a function of pay grade and tenure rather than of possessing the underlying skill set — the EQ, structure, and judgement that the job actually requires. Professions built on seniority ladders (law was cited directly) were said to produce senior figures who are excellent practitioners but poorly equipped, or unwilling, to manage people. Hard skills vs soft skills. One view split management (process, procedure, “hard skills”) from leadership (motivation, trust, relationship-building, “soft skills”) — with leadership pitched as the durable skill set precisely because process-following is what AI will increasingly be able to do. Process vs strategy. Managerialism was repeatedly described as technique in service of order, predictability, and coordination; leadership as direction, vision, and the willingness to evaluate the external environment and choose a path. Taken too far, managerialism was said to trade judgement, speed, and ownership for process compliance. Timescale. A recurring axis: management as short-to-mid-term operational delivery, leadership as the multi-year “North star.” One participant’s live example was AI strategy at board level — leaders talk about AI constantly but mostly at the level of tool adoption (e.g. Copilot), rarely as a multi-year business transformation; in that domain, in practice, almost everyone present is behaving as a manager, not a leader. Decisions and blame. Managerialism was framed as a way of avoiding accountability — “I followed the process, so I can’t be blamed for the outcome” — versus leadership as owning a decision, including the risk of being wrong, especially under time pressure (the example given was reacting to a supplier’s sudden bankruptcy, where waiting to complete a full process would be fatal). Where managerialism helps, and where it hinders Managerialism is not inherently good or bad. It helps in high-risk, repeatable environments needing coordination across many functions, where interchangeability matters more than creativity. It hinders where problems are complex and need contextual judgement, where innovation depends on curiosity and dissent, and where speed matters more than structure. Incentives and reward systems A significant thread connected managerialism to how people are paid and evaluated. Reward systems built around clear, narrow KPIs (”carrot and stick”) work well when the task is well defined and the goal is simply to do more, faster. They work far less well against today’s less-defined, more peripheral problems, which require creativity and departure from established process — precisely what bonus-driven KPI compliance discourages. This was offered as one explanation for why leaders default to process-following and keeping metrics green. Boards, capability, and time horizon A live debate: has excessive pressure and pace actually pushed leadership toward more managerialism, not less? One perspective, drawn from direct experience rather than theory, was that in difficult, fast-moving periods, leaders often revert to directive, managerial behaviour rather than rising to strategic leadership, because the same pressure lands on them too. This was contrasted with the view that true leaders (as distinct from people merely occupying leadership roles) hold the wider vision precisely when times are hard — and that team composition and experience level also shape how much direction versus autonomy is appropriate. Separately, direct board-level experience was shared describing boards that lacked operational grounding in the company’s core function — a pharmaceutical board with no supply chain expertise ahead of the industry’s later pandemic-era supply shocks; a food manufacturer’s board and executive committee that had to be trained from scratch on commodity hedging despite hedging being central to protecting margins. The point made was not that boards should be pulled into day-to-day operations, but that some baseline fluency in the company’s core operational risks (supply chain, hedging, labour) is a precondition for credible oversight — a version of “diversity of thought” distinct from demographic diversity. This was linked to a broader pattern of boards and leadership optimising for the next reporting cycle (annual for public companies, roughly 2–3 years at most) rather than a 5–10 year horizon, with private and family-owned companies tending to default to even shorter, year-to-year thinking. Organisational life cycle Drawing on Aswath Damodaran’s framework for company life stages, a case was made that the appropriate style of leadership is not constant: early stages call for craft- and builder-driven leadership with high ownership, while later, mature stages become about keeping output steady (”widgets off the line”). Knowing where an organisation sits in its life cycle — and adjusting behaviour accordingly — was proposed as a precondition for knowing when managerialism is the right tool and when it isn’t. Google and Boeing were cited as examples of organisations that shifted from engineering- or founder-led cultures to manager-led ones, arguably at a cost to sustained innovation; Philips’ deliberate contraction (which enabled the rise of ASML) was cited as a case of managing decline well. Outsourced accountability A further thread: heavy reliance on external consultants (McKinsey, Bain, BCG were named as a category) can let both management and the consultants disclaim responsibility for outcomes — “it was their recommendation” / “we only advised, management decided” — leaving no one accountable. This was linked to a broader concern that excessive managerialism can tip into organisations serving the interests of an internal group (an “oligarchy”) rather than their stated purpose, and into people occupying roles designed to satisfy process rather than create value. Closing synthesis The discussion converged on a shared framing offered near the end: managerialism is not good or bad in itself — it is powerful. It brings order to complex systems but can pull attention away from outcomes and into process. It tends to grow, unnoticed, in the gaps where judgement should be exercised. The practical challenge for any organisation is recognising where structure creates clarity and should be kept, and where it creates noise and should be removed — so that the system serves the people running it, rather than the reverse. Possible future topics raised Whack-a-mole management — whether organisations are structured to react instantly to whatever happened yesterday, at the expense of strategy and planning. Locus of control(internal vs external) — drawing on a recent *Economist* piece — the difference between believing you can shape outcomes through your own agency versus navigating primarily in response to your environment. Organisational and product life cycles— understanding which life-cycle stage a business, product, or capability is in, and how that should change strategy and behaviour; noted that a single company may contain multiple products or capabilities at different life-cycle stages simultaneously, competing for the same resources. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.swissues.com (https://www.swissues.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   31 Aug 2026

   Curiosity

   Curiosity as the Foundation of Human Progress Curiosity was framed as the basis of humanity itself — the driver behind communication, technology, and social development. Without it, nothing advances; society doesn’t collapse but plateaus. Historical examples (postwar jet-engine development, Concorde) were used to argue that major leaps happen when curiosity moves from individual tinkering into mainstream, collective effort. A counterpoint was raised: intense focus on a single target (e.g., building Concorde) is itself a form of narrowed curiosity, and undirected curiosity can be seen as a distraction or wasteful — though most felt curiosity doesn’t need a defined target to be valuable, since exploration without an immediate payoff often pays off later. What Triggers Curiosity: Dissatisfaction vs. Inspiration A central debate emerged over the source of curiosity. One position held that curiosity is rooted in dissatisfaction — a felt gap or lack that pushes people to seek something better (from vinyl to CDs to streaming was offered as an example). The opposing view held that curiosity can arise from positive inspiration or openness to new experience, with no dissatisfaction required — simply noticing something and wanting to know more. A middle position suggested every act of curiosity needs some kind of trigger, whether cognitive/rational (dissatisfaction) or emotional (inspiration), and that “lacking something” is present even when it isn’t experienced negatively. Boredom was also proposed as a trigger distinct from dissatisfaction — many breakthrough ideas were said to emerge from low-energy, bored downtime rather than acute need. Curiosity Inside Organizations: Safety, Boundaries, and Disruption Companies often claim to want curious employees (one example: an employer listing curiosity as a formal guiding principle), but in practice they may resist the disruption curiosity produces, especially where established or political processes are challenged. Curiosity was said to require a “safe space” or at least a degree of trust and psychological safety to be expressed without personal risk. Leadership was described as needing to set boundaries or “guardrails” — enough freedom to explore, but within limits relevant to the work — otherwise curiosity risks becoming unfocused or wasteful. It was also suggested that what looks like disruptive curiosity from an employee may actually be a symptom of that person not having been involved in designing a process in the first place, rather than genuine curiosity. Systems Thinking: Boundaries, Boxes, and Unintended Consequences Curiosity exercised only “inside the box” of one’s own function or role produces limited results; real impact requires thinking about how actions ripple across organizational boundaries (an example given: HR self-service portals that reduce HR headcount but shift the burden — and time cost — onto employees elsewhere in the business). The point was made that most organizational functions are artificially bounded, and genuine improvement often requires questioning those boundaries rather than optimizing within them. Curiosity aimed too low, or curiosity that stays inside a box, was described as generating a lot of activity without meaningful return — curiosity needs to be “aimed high” and tied to a large enough outcome to be worth channeling. Developing Curiosity: Challenges, Education, and Culture Educational and developmental approaches were discussed as ways to build curiosity deliberately: shifting from teacher-centered/top-down instruction to student- or employee-centered approaches where people are given open, sometimes unsolved or paradox-laden challenges to work through themselves, rather than being told what to do. One academic case study found that a creativity course measurably increased analytical students’ strategic/out-of-the-box thinking, but had a much smaller effect on business students who may have started from a higher creative baseline — suggesting different starting points require different developmental approaches. Company culture — how open an organization is to new ideas — was also raised as a major determinant of whether curiosity gets expressed at all. AI and Curiosity: Amplifier or Substitute? Views diverged on whether AI increases or diminishes curiosity. On one hand, AI was seen as dramatically speeding up the process of getting answers and partial answers, freeing people to explore and build further (particularly valued in consulting/research contexts). On the other, there was concern that AI can be used to simply retrieve a ready-made, well-written answer without any curiosity being exercised at all — and that relying on a single AI model risks producing “gray average” recycled thinking rather than original insight. Suggested mitigations included querying multiple AI models against the same question, and treating AI as a “probe” that challenges one’s thinking (asking what’s missing, what other patterns exist) rather than a replacement for it. A related distinction was drawn between learning what an AI’s answer is versus understanding the methodology behind it — without the latter, users gain outcomes but not developed judgment. It was also noted that skill in prompting AI effectively is highly context-dependent: simple lookup use requires little skill, but specialized applications (marketing campaigns, coding) demand real prompting expertise. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.swissues.com (https://www.swissues.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

Inside a recent episode

Non-Executive Directors

Published 24 Nov 2025 · Transcript excerpt

[…] But there are those that are interested in you. For instance, one share buys you a platform at the annual general meeting. It happens a lot. Grandstanders are entitled to a platform at your annual show and use it to promote an aspect of ESG, environment, society and governance, that they're passionate about. Sometimes this can be a bit disruptive and they can filibuster a whole morning away. Others with a more business critical view on change can purchase the significant shareholding and become activists for change. NEDs must comply with statutory obligations which trump the interest of shareholders and cannot be challenged. […]