Titans of tech have a new executive coach

Since Bill Campbell, the “secret CEO whisperer”, died in 2016, the position of executive coach of choice to the titans of tech has been vacant. That void may now have been filled, judging by a glowing profile in the latest Bloomberg Businessweek of Joe Hudson, whose Silicon Valley clients include OpenAI, the firm led by Sam Altman.

Campbell and Hudson could hardly be more different – which speaks volumes about the changing needs of Silicon Valley leaders. Campbell, a no-nonsense former football coach, delivered advice from the heart gruffly and without BS – a locker-room-cum-sports-bar approach that journalist Jennifer Reingold labelled “management by Bud Light”.

According to Altman, Hudson, a long-time meditator, “deeply understands emotional clarity and how to get there”, a “superpower” the billionaire boss believes will be “one of the most critical skills” in the coming era of artificial general intelligence (AI that can think for itself). Hudson’s ideas about “emotional fluidity”, an individual’s ability to acknowledge their conflicting emotions and maintain a healthy, sometimes tearful, dialogue between them, echo the “internal family systems” school of therapy of Richard Schwartz – now the house theology of Silicon Valley wellness.

As he coached Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, the Google Guys et al, Campbell was the grownup in the room that those running tech’s blitz-scaling companies needed. Today’s Silicon Valley bosses seek something else. As public attitudes harden against them, what’s not to like about a coach who, as one chief executive client put it, “taught me how to love myself”? More fundamentally, they may have concluded that as thinking is increasingly done better by AI, the only thing making humans superior is our ability to feel – so they had better get professional help to figure out how to do it well.

EasyJet takeover bid hits a bump

Fasten your seatbelts: a bidding war for Luton-based easyJet may soon take off. Having built up a 2% stake in the budget airline, US aviation-finance investor Castlelake has until Friday, under City takeover rules, to announce if it will make a formal offer to acquire it.

EasyJet has dismissed Castlelake’s interest as “opportunistic”. The London Stock Exchange-listed airline is surely right that investors currently undervalue it, with its market cap now only a little over £3bn, down from around £7bn in 2015. Higher fuel costs due to the Iran war and travellers’ reluctance to book summer holidays have recently buffeted a share price that never really recovered after Covid. Yet its modern fleet of aircraft alone is reckoned to be worth around £5bn, not to mention all those valuable airport slots and a healthy operating business.

By highlighting this mystifyingly low valuation, Castlelake has prompted a 10% jump in easyJet’s share price. It could choose to walk away now with a decent profit. If it does bid, however, it will need to secure a local partner.

Meanwhile, rival airlines are rumoured to be considering making a move. They include Air France-KLM and Lufthansa, which are already bidding for the Portuguese airline, TAP. Last week, Luis Gallego, chief executive of BA owner IAG, said his firm was potentially interested in easyJet, too, before complaining that “with the current competition regulation I see it as very, very difficult”.

These regulations, he added, are hindering much needed consolidation in Europe that could make its airline business more efficient. While he has a point regarding the inefficiencies of smaller remaining flag carriers such as TAP, a lesson from consolidation in the US, which has fewer regulatory barriers, is that mergers tend to result in higher fares. Price-conscious travellers should hope that competitive low-cost carriers like easyJet remain unconsolidated.

Fortune favours older firms to lead innovation

Aircraft engine maker Rolls-Royce is the only British company in the top 10 of Fortune magazine’s new ranking of Europe’s most innovative companies. It has dropped a place, to fourth, since last year, when the top 10 also included two other British firms, drug maker GSK and consumer products giant Unilever.

Leading the ranking is ASML, a Dutch firm whose lithography machines print the chips that power America’s AI boom. Unlike Fortune’s list of most innovative US firms, which is dominated by tech giants (with a top three of Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Apple), the leading European firms are older and more concerned with producing physical products like cosmetics (L’Oréal) and tyres (Michelin) than bits and bots. Several of Europe’s top 10 are more than a century old.

At the level of the corporate giant, there is a clear transatlantic divide – and a real question about which side will dominate the industries of the future. That said, where would America’s AI superscalers be without ASML, for instance? And what would those newly minted AI fortunes be spent on without the latest products from Europe’s luxury goods companies?

Another recent ranking, from Dealroom, a data firm that tracks startups, scale-ups and investors, paints a more upbeat picture of British tech innovation in particular, with London this year reclaiming the European tech ecosystem top spot (and global fourth place) from Paris.

Dealroom also counts around 700 venture-backed companies across the UK and its EMEA neighbours that each earn more than $100m a year in revenue. These so-called thoroughbreds could become the big companies topping future Fortune innovation rankings – provided they can break out of the established old-world cycle of having to sell out to American rivals because they can’t raise the capital they need to continue to innovate and grow independently.

Photograph courtesy artofaccomplishment.com