Francesca Cassidy

1 week ago | raconteur.net | Francesca Cassidy

For Tom Hale, CEO of Oura, the Finnish smart-ring company, the “right” role was worth waiting for. After graduating from Harvard, Hale took senior positions at some of the world’s most exciting tech companies, including Macromedia, which was acquired by Adobe in 2005. He then served as chief operations officer at HomeAway, a travel company, before spending five years as president of Momentive AI. But when the chief executive role opened at Oura, Hale knew that the right role had finally come.

3 weeks ago | raconteur.net | Francesca Cassidy

For decades, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has been dominated by consumer-facing campaigns – brands that wow audiences with emotional storytelling, viral videos and purpose-led messaging. Business-to-business marketing, on the other hand, has been traditionally viewed as dry, unimaginative and statistic-heavy. But that tide is turning. B2B is rapidly becoming one of the most exciting frontiers for marketing creativity. Unlike some B2C budgets, B2B budgets are growing.

1 month ago | raconteur.net | Francesca Cassidy

Last week – on so-called ‘Liberation Day’ – US President Donald Trump announced a slew of new tariffs on dozens of counties. Although there has been much discussion of tariffs since the president took office, the scale of the levies announced caught many off guard. The EU has been hit with a blanket 20% tariff and many Asian nations, including Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan, have also been targeted. The highest tariffs have been levied against China.

2 months ago | raconteur.net | Francesca Cassidy

A new study by the University of Cambridge suggests that the path to the top of business may no longer require higher education as a first step When Tony Blair gave his now-famous “education, education, education” speech in May 2001, he stated the Labour party’s goal was to see 50% of young adults progressing to higher education by 2010. Nearly 25 years later, progress towards Blair’s goal has been rocky. In February, the Office for National Statistics released data showing that the number of...

Feb 12, 2025 | raconteur.net | Francesca Cassidy

From diversifying vendors to drafting incident response plans, businesses are applying lessons from the largest IT outage of all time – Crowdstrike When Crowdstrike issued a faulty update to its security software in July 2024, sections of the economy ground to a halt as businesses were forced to manually reboot their IT systems. Flights were cancelled, payment systems were disrupted and news broadcasters went off air. In total, an estimated 8.5 million Windows devices were affected by the...