Still, hardly anyone now questions the firm’s vertically integrated business model, running all the way from cocoa bean to chocolate bar. Mr Schumacher’s predecessor, Peter Feld, wanted to break the mould, splitting the capital-intensive cocoa-processing unit, which is vulnerable to volatile cocoa prices, from the more stable and profitable chocolate-making business. Disagreement is said to have led to his departure. Finding buyers for the processing factories would have been difficult, says Daniel Bürki of Zürcher Kantonalbank, another Swiss lender. After years of disappointment, caution is wise. Mr Schumacher is wary of how economic and geopolitical uncertainty might affect consumers. And a strong El Niño is forecast, a climate pattern that could hurt cocoa harvests and raise bean prices again. So far he has the benefit of the doubt. But his recipe has yet to be tested. ■ To track the trends shaping commerce, industry and technology, sign up to “The Bottom Line”, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter on global business. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/06/11/another-new-boss-aims-to-fix-the- worlds-biggest-chocolate-maker
Too many people are shockingly bad at prioritisation Choosing where to focus is among the most important skills June 11th 2026 Work is a series of decisions about what to prioritise. Occasionally, events set the agenda: when the covid-19 pandemic shut down the world in 2020, for example, it was pretty obvious which problems firms had to focus on. But normally managers must weigh up for themselves how to allocate capital, decide which initiatives to concentrate on and work out which numbers matter most. Product teams have to choose which features to work on first. Sales teams must decide which customers to focus on. And day by day, hour by hour, individuals have to work out how to spend their next chunk of time.
It’s a shame, then, that people are often very bad at setting priorities. Individuals seem to be so motivated by achieving goals of any kind that they find it hard to abandon them. In one lab experiment, Timothy Ballard of the University of Queensland and his co-authors asked participants to pursue two competing goals, and varied the monetary rewards on offer. Even in cases where the reward for achieving one goal was the same as achieving both (and pursuing both made it more likely that neither would be attained), participants tried to get both done. When people have to make a choice about what to do next, they often pick the thing that seems achievable, even if that is not in their interests. A paper by Moty Amar of the Ono Academic College and his co-authors found that indebted consumers prioritised paying off small debts ahead of larger debts with higher interest rates. A tangible sense of progress was more important to them than the rational choice. This kind of behaviour is observable in offices, too. Being the 400th person to review a document adds nothing of value, but at least you can go home with some sort of achievement to your name. Organisations, or rather the people who run them, are not necessarily much better. Some bosses regard everything they ask for as a priority; even if they don’t, their employees may behave as though nothing matters more. Many firms accumulate so many priorities that they suffer the “peanut-butter problem” of attention and resources being spread too thinly across all of them. When Niels Christiansen, chief executive of Lego, took charge of the toymaker, he found lots of examples of this. “We had 100 key enterprise risks. How can you look after 100 different risks without being risk-averse on everything you do?” All sorts of frameworks exist to enable better prioritisation. The Eisenhower matrix is a classic time-management technique for individuals, which involves categorising tasks into quadrants. An urgent and important task belongs at the top of the queue. An important and non-urgent task is the sort that you need to make time for. If you are doing non-urgent and unimportant tasks, you need to take a long hard look in the mirror.
The action-priority matrix is another way of dividing tasks into quadrants, this time based on impact and effort. Product teams often use a scoring model called RICE (reach, impact, confidence and effort). MoSCoW is a framework for teams to distinguish between must-have, should-have, could- have and won’t-have features. Google pioneered the 70:20:10 rule for how to allocate resources to innovation: 70% on the core business, 20% on adjacent activities and 10% on totally new ideas. (If the thought of choosing which prioritisation framework to prioritise paralyses you, just choose one at random.) Establishing what matters is not enough, however. If you are setting priorities for a team, you then need to communicate them properly. In 2017 Donald Sull of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his co-authors asked senior executives at 124 organisations to recite their company’s strategic priorities. They found that in the typical company, only about half of its leaders agreed on what these were. When you prioritise a new thing, you also need to deprioritise an existing one. In their book “The Octopus Organisation”, Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner, two Amazon executives, recommend having explicit rules for cancelling initiatives. They give the example of projects that have explicit “go/kill” decision points, and of software projects with “kill criteria” like team attrition rates or time commitments that exceed a certain threshold. The language is excessively martial, but the sentiment is absolutely right. Effective prioritisation means choosing, communicating and stopping. Henceforth to be known as CaraCaS. ■ Step inside the world of work with our Bartleby newsletter. Each week our white-collar oracle muses on the agonies of office life. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/06/11/too-many-people-are-shockingly-bad- at-prioritisation
American capitalism is run by millionaires, not billionaires They hide in plain sight—and wield enormous power June 11th 2026 Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley want to change the world. The ones profiled in “The Everywhere Millionaire”, a forthcoming book by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, are different. They find something boring, often catatonically so, then pursue it with star-spangled doggedness until they become rich. A typical character sells gutters in Texas. Another distributes toilet paper in New Jersey. One woman in California began baking quiches for her own parties and simply did not stop. Two decades later she was making more than a million quiches a day and owned a yacht. The authors are economists in the vein of their subjects. Messrs Zidar and Zwick, of Princeton and Chicago universities respectively, spend their days
toiling in the thicket of America’s tax data. Much of their work involves untangling the effect of a 1986 law that cut the top rate of individual tax to below the corporate one. As changes to the tax code are wont to do, this brought about a vast reorganisation of American business. Private corporations were reconstituted as partnerships, sole-proprietorships and other structures which “pass through” profits directly to their owners, who then pay income tax. These firms receive far less attention than they ought to. Journalists, academics and investors spend most of their time thinking about public companies. Populists direct their anger at a handful of tech executives, because they are the richest and the strangest. Yet for each member of the Forbes 400 list of America’s wealthiest people, the authors find there are more than 4,000 owners of private businesses who are worth at least $10m apiece. The top private business owners are better off than public-company chief executives. A number of the characters in the book are millionaires in the same way Warren Buffett, the paragon of Main Street capitalism, is a millionaire—which is to say they are actually billionaires. An unavoidable conclusion is that the very rich in some ways have it better than the very, very rich. Happier is the local hero with a bowling alley in his house than the national villain with a rocket on his ranch. Often they travel in the same luxurious style. The authors used private-jet and yacht- ownership records to find the poultry and paper magnates who appear in the book. And plenty own sports teams. These entrepreneurs benefit from many of the political privileges that titans of tech or finance enjoy, yet manage to avoid public opprobrium. Barrels of newspaper ink have, for instance, been spilled over the political influence of Elon Musk, who may soon become the world’s first trillionaire. Far fewer have been dedicated to explaining why most American states ban or severely limit carmakers, including Tesla, from selling vehicles directly to customers. Almost 10,000 coddled car dealerships, which are represented mightily in Congress, have at least one owner in the top 0.1% of national income. Beer distributors are another protected species of wealthy and anonymous Mr Bigs.