In a founder-centric organization, the founder isn’t just the CEO. They’re the mascot, the mythology, the exception to the rules, and the emotional thermostat of the building. Identity, authority, and narrative all get bundled into one human nervous system. That’s efficient. It’s also a little like running a power grid through a single extension cord.
Low rivers and unusually warm water are beginning to take electricity generation off the table in parts of Europe, just as summer heat is putting the power system under pressure. Yet for all the strain showing at its edges, the continent’s grid is holding. That is what the Electricity Coordination Group said, which convened an ad hoc meeting as heatwaves and drought continued to affect parts of Europe. Experts from the European Commission, EU countries, Ukraine, Moldova, the Energy Community Secretariat and the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity, or ENTSO-E, found no short-term adequacy risks to electricity supply.
On the morning of July 16, I looked outside in Milwaukee and the city seemed to have misplaced its horizon. The light had that strange, dirty cast that wildfire smoke gives it, and the air smelled faintly burned. This was Wisconsin, not a community evacuating ahead of a fire line. Nothing nearby was burning. The fires were hundreds of miles away, in northern Minnesota near the Boundary Waters and across Canada. Yet by then, the distinction between where the disaster was happening and where its consequences were being felt had become almost meaningless.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore is urging financial institutions to look beyond control deficiencies when serious risk events recur, warning that remediation may not hold if the behavioral patterns and cultural conditions behind those failures remain unchanged.
The bids arriving in Australia's wholesale electricity market increasingly have no trader behind the keyboard. They are generated by software following predefined instructions, often reacting to changing market conditions before a person has time to intervene. The technology has become common enough that the Australian Energy Regulator decided it was time to address not the software itself, but the responsibilities that survive its use.
The European insurance sector remains on stable footing despite growing geopolitical uncertainty and an increasingly challenging cyber threat landscape, according to the latest risk assessment from the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA).
A banking outage used to be the sort of event that invited an engineering postmortem. Something broke, someone fixed it, and a report followed. Japan's Financial Services Agency no longer believes that sequence tells the whole story.