INDUSTRY
Ian Bremmer founded Eurasia Group in 1998 when he discovered that the private sector didn’t normally hire political scientists. He now has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Stamford, CT, London, Tokyo, São Paulo, and San Francisco, with more than 150 full-time employees consulting to world leaders and major corporations. But for Bremmer, who regularly appears on Charlie Rose and speaks to world leaders around the globe, these accomplishments seem ornamental, secondary to a mission built around fact-based discussions on what is happening geo-politically and how America, with all its world privilege, has choice on how to use its powers. His Twitter feed is as frank as they get.
Throughout the world, and specifically in the US, we've really seen a shift to making urban environments more dense. Bicycling is really the fastest and largest growing form of transportation in the US.
In Boston, there are probably three major challenges that we're all trying to look at: public transportation, public education, and affordable housing.
One role is to try to ensure that if those institutions get into trouble, that they fail on their own, without bringing down the rest of the country.
Anyone who tells you these days they know the impact that online learning is going to have on the future of higher education is blowing smoke.
Health care is a market. It's not a well-functioning market, but Americans should understand that they're paying the bill and start demanding things like price transparency, rational pricing, value for their money, convenience, and getting a doctors appointment outside of 10-3. How about staying open until 7:00? How about publishing your price list?
We would ask, 'what can we do to be different from everybody else?' and that's what led us to concentrate on the whole idea of innovation as a process and the whole idea of fundamental research and development in glass as critical to the future success of the company.
What we're missing is really this ability to sell ourselves. We're really conservative and modest. We don't want to oversell ourselves. And the Swiss don't forgive you if you fail. That makes it hard to take a risk.