The pandemic, trade restrictions and geopolitical conflict have revived an old lesson: global supply chains are efficient, but they are also vulnerable. The most consequential weaknesses are…

In the spring of 1961, some of America's brightest foreign policy minds were gathered around the young U.S. President John F. Kennedy. On the table lay the plan for the invasion of the Bay of…

Two thousand years ago, anyone who wanted to know whether a battle, a journey, or a political endeavor would turn out well had an astonishing array of consulting services to choose from. One…

On October 15, 2026, the Governing Board of the International Energy Agency decided to expedite the remaining releases from emergency reserves. Approximately 330 million barrels had already been…

In the early 2000s, Nokia could probably have produced an impressive analysis of the past. Sales trends, market share, production quality, supply chains, brand strength—plenty of data and likely…

Decades before Fukushima, the nuclear industry had taken a fundamental methodological step: moving away from exclusively deterministic safety assessments and toward a systematic probabilistic…

300 suppliers, six risk characteristics, and a single question: Which suppliers are truly similar? Cluster analysis attempts to reveal hidden structures in multidimensional data—without…

After the 1986 Challenger disaster, physicist Richard Feynman encountered a remarkable range of estimates while working for the investigation commission. Estimates for a catastrophic failure of…

Artificial intelligence has long been more than just a technological issue. It is transforming investment flows, productivity, labor markets, global trade, and financial markets—and thus…

"Our system detects 99 percent of all attacks", announces the head of IT security. The CFO nods with relief: "So does that mean an alarm is a real attack 99 percent of the time?" Unfortunately,…

In May 2026, BayWa AG, a Munich-based agricultural group, reported a "solid" liquidity position for the first quarter and an adjusted EBITDA above the targets set out in the restructuring plan.…

Imagine the production manager reporting to the board: "On average, our IT outages last only four hours." A collective sigh of relief. Four hours—you can survive that. Unfortunately, this average…

Cybersecurity can be so reassuring. After all, we’ve inventoried everything: servers, clients, applications, databases, interfaces, cloud services. Every asset has an owner, a criticality level,…

In the first half of 2026, Munich Re did two things that appear contradictory at first sight. In life and health reinsurance, it completed its largest-ever single longevity transaction, covering…

First OpenAI, then Anthropic and Meta – and now Google has acknowledged a striking incident involving one of its most powerful AI systems. During a cybersecurity test, Gemini moved beyond the…

Frontier AI changes the cyber threat landscape not because it suddenly invents an entirely new catalogue of attack techniques, but because it changes the speed, scale and autonomy with which…

The paradox has long been visible: cybersecurity is on board agendas, budgets are rising, and regulation is making senior management personally accountable. Yet security leaders regularly report…