Cirque du Soleil has seen the effects of climate change on a firsthand basis. It’s been holding outdoor shows in its big top tents for nearly 40 years, and it’s had to adapt to extreme heat and more intense thunderstorms.

Duncan Fisher, VP of operations and GM of the touring show division at Cirque du Soleil, spoke with CFO Brew about changes the company has implemented to cope with rising energy costs while reducing its impact on the environment.

What changes has Cirque du Soleil made to reduce the financial impact from climate change?

Energy costs have gone up across the board, be it for cooling or for trucking. We want to make sure that we’re as environmentally friendly as possible, and financially responsible as possible as well, by not using as much fuel. So there’s a couple of things that we’ve done.

We typically return year after year to the sites we go to with the big top. Over the last five or six years, we had a big push on installing regular shore power [A/C power from the electrical grid] onto the sites rather than using generators. We’ve been in touch with the electric companies in the cities that we go to, and have installed transformers on what may have just been a vacant field or parking lot at a stadium that had no reason to have electricity before, so we can use regular power for the shows, which is much less impactful than a generator. And we don’t have noise pollution as well.

If you look back at Cirque’s history, the iconic big top was always blue and yellow. We don’t use that anymore. And the reason that we don’t is that the blue and yellow had a very high rate of absorption of sunlight. So we tend to now use either blue and white, or gray and white, or completely white tents. The white is much more reflective of the sun’s rays. Just by changing the color of the tent, we had about a 20% reduction of the energy that we had to use for air conditioning.

Keep reading.—CV

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Generative AI has been one of corporate boards’ top concerns this year, according to KPMG’s mid-year observations on the 2023 board agenda. The technology is “being discussed in most boardrooms, as companies and their boards are seeking to understand its associated opportunities and risks,” the KPMG Board Leadership Center noted in its report.

That’s a striking change from just six months ago. AI played a minor role in KPMG’s On the 2023 Board Agenda report released in December 2022. That report discussed AI as just one of various technology-related issues, alongside data governance, cybersecurity, and economic risk.

But rapid advances in generative AI technology have put it atop boards’ priority list. Board members are seeking more education about AI, according to KPMG’s new report. They’re asking for experts to conduct high-level training on the benefits and risks of AI.

Continue reading.—CV

The M&A market right now is a little like a street-cart hot dog—hot but cheap. The volume of M&A deals “flirted with near-record highs” in the second quarter, according to PitchBook’s latest Global M&A Report. However, that increase in volume came with a substantial discount: “Deal value fell to $873.4 billion in Q2, down 6.5% from Q1, for one of the weakest quarters recorded since the pandemic-induced free fall of Q2 2020,” the report noted.

For financial professionals involved in M&A activity, this could be good news or bad news, depending on whether you’re planning to acquire, or hoping to be acquired. On either side of the transaction, it seems clear that you can get to a deal, so long as sellers are willing to accept lower valuations.

Even setting aside the lowered pricing we saw in the past two years, it’s clear that executives selling their firms need to recalibrate their ideas about what a company valuation looks like. Compared to pre-pandemic pricing, today’s M&A deals aren’t close: “Q2 dollar volume has fallen to 14.8% below the 2017 to 2019 quarterly average,” according to PitchBook. That’s the case even as deal volume is up 28.8% compared to that period. Indeed, PitchBook said, M&A deal prices “are in full correction mode.”

Keep reading.—SW

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Big tech execs from Google, Microsoft, and IBM are teaming up with academics and public sector experts. The goal? To level up privacy professionals into AI leaders. Big tech execs from Google, Microsoft, and IBM are teaming up with academics and public sector experts. The goal? To level up privacy professionals into AI leaders. Check it out. Check it out.