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How do firms and public institutions regain greatness while wrestling with risk, disruption, and their responsibilities to investors, employees, and the public? When businesses and other organizations pursue their strategies, they inevitably run into ethical boundaries that don’t neatly align with their goals. On the Cusp: Between Strategy and Ethics is about what happens in that zone of collision where executives, policymakers, and citizens must decide whether to stretch the rules, redraw them, or change course altogether. Each episode takes up a concrete case, from shareholder primacy to AI, finance, and democratic accountability, asking a simple but uncomfortable question: what do “great” organizations owe the societies that can make their success more possible?
On the Cusp is hosted by Alfred Marcus, Professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. He has published several books including Comeback: Can Great Companies Rise Again? and Managing Business Ethics co-authored with Tim Hargrave. He has spent much of his career on the cusp between strategy and ethics and hopes to understand that fault line far better through this podcast series.
For more than two centuries, economists and researchers have struggled with the conundrum of reconciling Adam Smith’s views on economics and ethics. W…
Automata examines how AI and advanced robotics are rapidly surpassing human abilities in fields once thought uniquely ours – from playing chess to dis…
Despite the importance of innovation for the growth of firms, industries, and the national economy, the strategic tools available to effectively manag…
Most people hate and fear uncertainty. It causes such stress and anxiety that we often choose certain surrender over doubt, becoming passive, dependen…
Societal grand challenges have taken a toll on humanity, which finds itself at a crossroads. The concentration of wealth and economic inequality, the …
The book places special emphasis on the relationship between corporations, managers, and shareholders. Drawing on Lynn Stout’s influential work on cor…
Giant companies, launch rockets into space, control satellite communication and develop era-defining AI technologies. But they are also seen as promot…
In Money and Promises: Seven Deals That Changed the World, the distinguished banker, executive, and historian Paolo Zannoni examines the complex relat…
In The Making of Modern Corporate Finance: A History of the Ideas and How They Help Build the Wealth of Nations (Columbia Business School Publishing, …
Streetwise: Saving Ourselves from Big Car (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2025) exposes how “Big Car”―the complex of companies in the automobile…
Since the start of this century, businesses have confronted a series of extreme and constant disruptions, including technological upheavals, a pandemi…
One of the greatest challenges facing any start-up is “crossing the chasm”: bridging the gap between early adopters and mass-market buyers. Yet many p…
Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually gro…
The world is encountering multiple crises - climate, droughts, floods, energy, food, and pandemics, to name a few. Capitalism and Crises: How to Fix T…
Based on applied economics and from the perspective of an innovator seeking to develop a new digital business, Digital Innovation Strategy (Cambridge …
In Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street (U California Press, 2022) Megan Tobias Neely, a former hedge fund worker takes an ethnographi…
The American Jewish philanthropic enterprise is unparalleled in scope, dynamism, and the diversity of funders and the causes they support. Yet even as…
Life is full of paradoxes. How can we each express our individuality while also being a team player? How do we balance work and life? How can we impro…
The Future of Employment in Africa: Demography, Labor Markets and Welfare explores the major trends that will define the face of the sub-Saharan conti…
Never before have we been presented with the prospect of redesigning business at scale to create a more sustainable future for our planet and the peop…