Deciding Factors by GLG – Details, episodes & analysis

This September, Professors John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato released their controversial new book, “How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy.” Mearsheimer, a longtime Professor at the University of Chicago, ranks among the most well-known advocates for the realist school of international relations. Put simply, realism argues that states act in their own interest. Rosato, a Professor at Notre Dame and fellow traveler, joins as his co-author.  

Among other assertions, Mearsheimer and Rosato argue that our tendency to view one nation’s adversaries as irrational or amoral clouds that nation’s ability to clearly assess others’ actions and determine an appropriate response.  

As one notable example, “How States Think” takes Vladmir Putin’s war against Ukraine as a case study in our human tendency to dismiss other states’ actions as irrational when perhaps what we mean is that we find them morally abhorrent. To be clear, Mearsheimer and Rosato don’t endorse Putin or his war, but they encourage us to reconsider our perception of his behavior and look deeper to see whether an underlying rationale may exist.  

The two scholars bring decades of experience to the project: Mearsheimer is a West Point grad and Air Force veteran who has authored a number of seminal political science and more popular books. He serves as the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor Political Science at the University of Chicago, and has taught at the university since 1982. Rosato currently serves as the Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, and has authored several books.  

Listen along as Mearsheimer and Rosato join host Eric Jaffe to discuss the unique writing dynamic that shaped their remarkable collaborative work, their approach to rationality and what they think policymakers could learn from it.  

While the US has managed to stave off a recession–at least for the time being–the global economy has nonetheless experienced a rocky couple of years: the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in the U.S. this spring; the growing impact of artificial intelligence on virtually all industries; inflation in the West and deflation in China, and the subsequent interest rate hikes. 

Fortunately, today’s guest on Deciding Factors is a veteran expert who can take us behind the curtain of the Federal Reserve to make sense of these factors and help us assess the state of the US economy.

Eric Rosengren is the former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where he also served as a member of the Federal Open Market Committee—the FOMC—which sets policies for the Fed.

Listen along as Eric helps explain the processes that the FMOC uses to guide their decision-making, offers a nuanced take on how artificial intelligence will impact the economy and shares why he’s surprised that markets have stayed resilient this year.

This episode marks our first with an individual who has made decisions regarding our military, in times of war: Decisions that impact the safety and well-being of millions of people, potentially for years to come. How exactly does one navigate such extraordinarily high stakes situations?

Ambassador Douglas Lute is a retired three-star general and the former US Ambassador to NATO. In 2007, then-President George W Bush appointed him to oversee the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, a role that earned him the title —one that doesn’t exactly thrill him— of war czar. Ambassador Lute additionally served as Director of Operations on the Joint Staff, where he oversaw U.S. military operations worldwide.

Listen in as Ambassador Lute discusses what it means to be an effective leader in the military, the lessons he thinks we have —or, for that matter, haven’t— learned from our military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even the unexpected details of his first meeting with the second President Bush.

As countless employers and job seekers alike can attest, we’re in the midst of an extraordinary shift in the job market – and that includes the hiring process. COVID-19 has changed our understanding of how people get hired, as well as the wages and work environments that employees seek. This  has wrought confusion and challenges at every level of the job market. The system can seem to be broken. 

 In today’s episode of the podcast, we speak to Mona Mourshed, the founding CEO of Generation, a global non-profit. Generation connects employers around the world with “a pipeline of new talent:” marginalized individuals, mid-career job seekers, and those without formal training.  Listen in as Mona discusses the people Generation serves, the ROI for the organization’s employer partners, and how Mona’s collaboration with GLG as a social impact fellow has helped push the non-profit to even greater success. 

Although many of us often find ourselves feeling discouraged and helpless in our fight to combat the climate crisis, there are still some reasons to remain optimistic.

One example is the emerging field of ESG investing: the act—and art—of evaluating companies through the lens of their environmental, social, and governance standards.

Today’s guest, Arun Sharma, is a leading advocate of ESG investing. Throughout his career—both as the current President of Grovepike Associates, a global strategic and financial advisory firm, and as the former Chief Investment Officer at the International Finance Corporation—Arun has championed causes and ideas that lead to more sustainable, pragmatic, and forward-thinking businesses.

Listen in as Arun walks us through his career and the lessons he’s learned about ESG investing: from his early experiences with environmental remediation in Poland, to the metrics for measuring success with ESG, to why he thinks humans will increasingly incorporate the ESG approach in the years to come.

As mask mandates and other COVID prevention measures ease across the country, companies are planning how they will bring their employees back into the office.

But in the two years since millions of Americans began working remotely, the entire world of work has changed. And it’s not going back to the way it was. 

In this episode, we speak to Kian Gohar, co-author of the new book, Competing in the New World of Work: How Radical Adaptability Separates the Best from the Rest, about some of the biggest challenges and questions facing employers in this new work landscape: from effective hybrid work models, to the software and tools that can help companies succeed, and harnessing the work styles and values of Gen Z. 

Of all the social media platforms that have become ubiquitous to modern living, Twitter has been among the most influential. 

The company’s success, however, has been a double-edged sword: utilized to spotlight wrongdoing and organize for positive change, it can also fuel echo chambers and further divide us from one another.  

In today’s episode, Eric speaks to Kirstine Stewart, the former Founding General Manager of Twitter Canada and the former VP of Media in North America, to learn more about the company’s roller coaster history, including the multiple departures of its founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, the way Twitter has shaped the media industry and the changes she would make to Twitter if she were CEO 

Each year since 2019, GLG has surveyed CEOs around the world to gauge their outlook on the global economy and the challenges they anticipate in the year to come.  This year, the 2022 GLG CEO Survey, a truly global document includes input from nearly five hundred executives from across the Americas, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific, examines a year like no other.  The survey includes insights into both these executives’ concerns for the global economy and their own businesses in 2022, as well as their reasons for optimism. 

 In this episode of Deciding Factors, Eric Jaffe speaks to veteran businessman and best-selling author Ron Williams about the survey. Together, they dig into some of the most significant findings from the survey - including concerns around employee engagement, a general bullish view of the market, and their outlook on the supply chain. Ron furthermore provides input from his own career and how he sees the widely-used apprenticeship model playing out in a hybrid or remote work environment. 

It’s been more than a year and a half since the coronavirus pandemic spread across the globe, and while some aspects of the crisis have been brought under control, others remain extremely difficult to manage. 

Navigating the pandemic, particularly at its outset, required resourceful experts who could make decisions of enormous consequence with limited data or precedent.  

 In this episode, we speak to Dr. Oxiris Barbot, who served as Health Commissioner for New York City from 2018 to 2020, about the lessons she learned during those harrowing first months of the pandemic, and the life-saving decisions she was forced to make. Dr. Barbot also walks us through her strategies for countering our ongoing challenges with COVID-19, such as the Delta variant, the logistics of vaccinating young children and how to ensure we consider racial equity in our approach to fighting the pandemic. 

You don’t have to look far these days to see that many Americans are skeptical of our political leaders, and even our political system writ large. 

Despite our wariness, however, many of us remain eager to participate constructively in the political process, or even run for office. Yet the path to getting involved in politics can be difficult to navigate, or even find. 

In this episode, John Podesta - former chief of staff to President Clinton, counselor to President Obama and chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign - reflects on the lessons he’s learned about effective leadership over 50 years of service, the joys and rewards of engaging in the political process and the young politicians he sees as the potential leaders of tomorrow.