‘Becoming a Principle-Driven Leader’ Review: Prosperity and Progress

The Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2026

by Theodore Kinni




Perhaps being a nepo baby isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Take Chase Koch, whose father, Charles, has long served as chairman of Koch, Inc., a conglomerate that generates more than $125 billion in annual revenue. The younger Mr. Koch, now an executive vice president at the family business, reports that his father made him undergo a capitalist’s education from a young age.

“Every Sunday,” Mr. Koch remembers, “my sister, Elizabeth, and I were required to listen to books on tape from the thinkers, doers, and dreamers” who had shaped their father’s “understanding of the world. . . . What ten-year-old wants to listen to lectures from Friedrich Hayek, Abraham Maslow, Thomas Sowell, and Milton Friedman?”

Readers get a taste of those Sundays in “Becoming a Principle-Driven Leader,” which Mr. Koch co-wrote with his 90-year-old father. The Kochs declare that 41 principles—a mix of legal and economic concepts ranging from property rights to marginal analysis—are responsible for the “nine-thousandfold” growth of the company since 1960 and, less plausibly, for human progress itself... read the rest here.

‘What to Make of a Life’ Review: Encoded for Success

The Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2026

by Theodore Kinni

In 1995, a year after co-writing a bestselling book on the habits of great companies, Jim Collins left the faculty of Stanford’s business school to found his own management lab. Over the course of his work, Mr. Collins became interested in how people create engaging lives for themselves. He shares his findings in “What to Make of a Life.”

The book examines luminaries in matched pairs from the worlds of music (Jimmy Page and Robert Plant), writing (Toni Morrison and Barbara W. Tuchman), politics (Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford) and more. Why such well-known people? Because “that’s where the data is,” Mr. Collins writes. He recounts his subjects’ accomplishments with an eye to exploring three questions that many of us have asked at some point. How do I find a path that is right for me? What do I do when my current path ends? How do I stay engaged over a lifetime? Read the rest here.

‘Superteams’ Review: Focused Collaboration

The Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2026

by Theodore Kinni

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, many leaders claimed that effective teamwork required remote workers to return to their cubicles. Ron Friedman begs to differ.

In “Superteams,” the social psychologist reports that high-performing teams are as likely to work well at home as in the office. “Far more important than where a team works is how it works,” he declares. What makes a great team? Mr. Friedman sought the answer by interviewing more than 6,000 professionals who say their teams are tops to find out what they do differently from the rest. He found that the members of these teams get more done, make one another better and are constantly improving. Read the rest here.

Built to compete: Business model reinvention for tech champions in the Middle East

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy& Middle East, April 2026

By Achilles Drettas, Chady Smayra, Nikolaos Lioulis, and Ibrahim Moufarrej




Driven by innovation, customer needs, and government actions, the Gulf’s technology markets are growing and morphing at a dizzying pace. To win in this environment, tech company leaders must act, but they cannot simply chase the rapidly multiplying opportunities. Instead, they must reinvent themselves with intent by making deliberate, aligned choices about how they create, deliver, and capture value through business model reinvention (BMR).

BMR begins with strategic clarity. To become champions, tech companies need to formulate a distinctive way to play based on their inherent strengths and market dynamics. This requires making a set of clear, interdependent choices about how the company will compete, whom it will serve, what products and services it will offer, and how it will go to market.

Next, tech champions must ensure that the organizational capabilities required to execute the way to play are in place. Each way to play demands a distinct configuration of strengths across the realms of technology, talent, go-to-market, and delivery. When the right set of capabilities is intentionally developed and integrated, companies can turn strategic clarity into competitive advantage and then scale with confidence.

Finally, tech champions must design and implement an operating model that consistently enables the capabilities its strategy requires. The operating model defines decision rights, investment and resource allocation, governance and risk thresholds, performance metrics and incentives, core processes and enabling systems, and the operating cadence that shapes everyday behaviors. When these choices are properly aligned with the capability system, a way to play becomes a muscle memory within an organization.

In the Gulf’s fast-paced technology sectors, BMR delivers impact only when a company’s strategy, capabilities, and operating model are tightly aligned. This alignment is what separates technology champions from their competitors. Download the viewpoint here.

Making the Gulf countries’ big bets on building logistics hubs pay off

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Logistics Middle East, March 2026

by Maha Raad, Hamza El Mounhi, and Massimo Campadese

Despite recent geopolitical turbulence and slowing economic growth, global trade is not retreating: it reached a record $33 trillion in 2024. However, global trade dynamics are fundamentally changing with trade routes emerging and shifting due to geopolitical tensions, intensified competition between trade blocs, and deeper regional supply chains, especially in the energy, automotive, advanced manufacturing, and technology sectors. These developments represent enormous opportunities for the GCC countries, where logistics play a crucial role in the achievement of economic transformations and national visions.

Sitting at the crossroads of Asia, Europe, and Africa, the GCC countries have a geographically commanding position in global trade. They already handle around 18% of global trade flows ($4.3 trillion in 2023). Dubai has established itself as a world-class logistics hub, and now, the other GCC countries are investing billions in their seaports, airports, and integrated supply chain capabilities. The success of their efforts to become hubs for global and regional trade and supply chains will depend not just on assets, but on strategy. Read the rest here.

Building with purpose: Five imperatives for shaping the cities of the future in the GCC

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy&, March 2026

by Marwan Bejjani, Elias Karam, Jean Aboueid, and Saad Iskandarani



Saudi Arabia’s giga developments, the repurposing of Qatar’s World Cup infrastructure, and other ambitious projects show that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have embarked on unprecedented visions of urban development. They are investing US$1 trillion to bring these visions to fruition. The returns they reap, however, will be determined not just by the magnitude of investment or dramatic new skylines, but by the long-term resilience and prosperity of the region’s cities. To meet the urban challenge, the GCC’s construction sector and government decision-makers need to consider five interrelated tensions. Each tension puts a different kind of pressure on cities. Read the rest here.

Meeting the compute imperative in the Gulf countries

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy&, January 2026

By Hani Zein, Fawaz Bou Alwan, Ali Ghaddar, and Mahsa Ettefagh

The Gulf’s AI journey is entering a transformative phase. AI is shifting from experimentation to scale, agentic systems are proliferating, and Gulf nations are building AI ecosystems featuring homegrown champions and local models, such as KSA’s Allam, UAE’s Falcon, and Qatar’s Fanar. This phase of AI development requires a critical enabler: sovereign compute processing power at scale. Now, Gulf nations must assess their future compute needs and act decisively to secure compute capacity.

AI is poised to become part of daily life in the Gulf. In healthcare for example, AI agents will review patient test results, suggest diagnoses, generate treatment plans, and manage patient journeys based on individual needs – updating records, scheduling follow-ups, and coordinating medication orders.

AI models are the heart of this transformation – and sustaining them requires vast processing power. The greatest demand for compute power will come from running models for real-time, low-latency inference. Compute will also be needed to build and train local models, and to fine-tune global models for regional and sector-specific applications.

To forecast how much compute power Gulf nations will require in the near term, we analyzed the volume of data that AI models will process — measured in model tokens, or small fragments of text, images, or other inputs – across training, fine-tuning and inference. We then translated this demand into the processing required (FLOPS, or floating-point operations per second) and the hardware needed to deliver it through GPUs. Our analysis reveals that the region will need 400,000 – 500,000 GPUs by 2028. Read the rest here.