Rajesh Jain

Stéphane Bancel: “Most people think about the future of business from the present onward. As humans we have a natural inclination to think linearly. However, this approach limits our creativity and inhibits our ability to achieve what was previously unimaginable. Consider a better alternative. By thinking five to 10 years out and then “playing the movie backward,” you free yourself from the constraints of what is possible now. You can envision year 10 and then figure out what has to happen in year nine, year eight, and so on for the vision to become reality.”

WSJ: “There’s a stark irony in Mr. Xi’s intensifying shift away from markets, for markets are what made China the economic powerhouse it is today. The robust growth that lifted China from poverty was driven by a hybrid model: a form of state capitalism in which Beijing allowed private ownership and U.S.-style free enterprise to flourish alongside large, low-productivity state-owned enterprises. China’s booming export-related manufacturing was driven by low-cost labor, government investment and highly efficient acquisition of foreign technology and know-how. With free enterprise, human capital flowed into China and drove innovation and productivity. China’s share of global exports rose from 4% in 2000 to 14% in 2015, creating well-paying jobs and domestic prosperity that financed modern urban infrastructure. China accounted for 30% of global growth in this period…By turning away from free enterprise, Xi Jinping ensures that the country’s economy will stop growing.”

McKinsey: Brooke Weddle: “Social capital, simply defined, is the presence of networks, relationships, and connections within any organization or, more broadly, community or culture. It’s been studied for decades, and some of the more recent work by Robert Putnam has emphasized the impact of social capital as it relates to ties in a community.” John Parsons: “With regard to individuals, it’s important to have connections to facilitate greater creativity and greater learning. There’s a lot of research that shows if you are more engaged, you’re more likely to stay. Connectivity can also help with career mobility. If you’re leading teams or you’re a part of a team, social capital is a building block that ultimately leads to that connection, that innovation, and that sharing of ideas.”

Samuel Gregg: “[I]ndustrial policy supposes that if markets apparently fail to produce certain products, or to foster certain economic sectors deemed important for regional or national well-being, the government must intervene to rectify the problem. But what if the failure is not one of the private sector at all? What if the problem is pre-existing high taxes on profits generated by start-ups? Or regulatory barriers to entry for entrepreneurs? Or weak protections for intellectual property rights? Or preexisting subsidies that incentivize businesses to invest in established industries rather than new enterprises? Or some combination of these factors? In short, what if the problem is primarily government failure? Even relatively free economies contain numerous distortions that flow from government interventions that create perverse incentives for labor and capital to flow in less-than-optimal directions. The solution to such problems is less government intervention, not an industrial policy.” [via CafeHayek]

HBR: “When you align your organization’s values with both your strategy and the values of your employees—creating what we call values alignment—you reap all sorts of benefits: higher job satisfaction, lower turnover, better teamwork, more-effective communication, bigger contributions to the organization, more-productive negotiations, and, perhaps surprisingly, more diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our favorite finding involved the impact of values alignment on the turnover of chief operating officers. When we studied the divisions of one multiunit organization, we found that COOs whose values alignment was low needed a salary increase of 40% to become as likely to stay in their jobs as those whose values alignment was high. Imagine that: An increase in values alignment had as great an effect as a 40% raise.”

ThePrint: “Councillors are the bridge between citizens and the government at the ‘first mile’ and are closest to the citizen, quite literally. India’s 87,215 city councillors across its 4,700 plus towns and cities are extremely important but often ignored stakeholders of urban governance. There is lamentable infrastructure, inadequate sanitation and waste management, and we devise solutions without considering the role of elected councillors to run cities…Citizens often reach out to MLAs and MPs instead of councillors. Poor turnout in civic polls is yet another sign that councillors are not valued.”

Hayek: “Differences in wealth, education, tradition, religion, language or race may today become the cause of differential treatment on the pretext of a pretended principle of social justice or of public necessity. Once such discrimination is recognised as legitimate, all the safeguards of individual freedom of the liberal tradition are gone. If it is assumed that whatever the majority decides is just, even if what it lays down is not a general rule, but aims at affecting particular people, it would be expecting too much to believe that a sense of justice will restrain the caprice of the majority: in any group it is soon believed that what is desired by the group is just.” [via CafeHayek]

Ruchir Sharma: “China is now a middle-income country, a stage when many economies naturally start to slow given the higher base. Its per capita income is currently $12,500, one-fifth that of the US. There are 38 advanced economies today, and all of them grew past the $12,500 income level in the decades after the second world war — most quite gradually. Only 19 grew at 2.5 per cent or faster for the next 10 years, and did so with a boost from more workers; on average the working age population grew at 1.2 per cent a year. Only two (Lithuania and Latvia) had a shrinking workforce. China is an outlier. It would be the first large middle-income country to sustain 2.5 per cent gross domestic product growth despite working-age population decline, which began in 2015. And in China this decline is precipitous, on track to contract at an annual rate of nearly 0.5 per cent in the coming decades. Then there’s the debt. In the 19 countries that sustained 2.5 per cent growth after reaching China’s current income level, debt (including government, households and businesses) averaged 170 per cent of GDP. None had debts nearly as high as China’s…China at 2.5 per cent growth has major implications for its ambitions as an economic, diplomatic and military superpower. A lesser China is more likely than the world yet realises.”

Joerg Wuttke: “Xi always says what he thinks. He has always done that, but for a long time it was not noticed in the Western world. The collapse of the Soviet Union had a fundamental impact on him, and he described the three Russian traumas early in his term in office: First, Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin was the original sin for him. Xi would never do such a thing with Mao, and he did so consistently. The old formula of «70% good, 30% bad» set up by Deng with regard to Mao was never heard of again under Xi. Secondly, Perestroika and Glasnost were, in Xi’s view, the catastrophe that led to the failure of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The third Russian trauma for Xi were the oligarchs who became filthy rich under Boris Yeltsin and became a countervailing power to the state. That scenario was out of the question for Xi, which he consistently demonstrated, especially with Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba. Xi is extremely consistent, you have to admire that, and at the same time he is also driven by history. He has studied the fall of the Soviet Union, and he has drawn the conclusion that this will not happen under his rule in China. On the contrary, he wants to show that communism will become a counter-model to capitalism.”

Mint: “McKinsey’s research across more than 1,000 companies identified four key reasons why culture matters to companies. One, culture correlates with performance. Those with top quartile cultures (as measured by McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index) posted a return to shareholders 60 percent higher than median companies and 200 percent higher than those in the bottom quartile. Two, culture is inherently difficult to copy. The ultimate competitive advantage, they found, is a healthy culture that adapts automatically to changing conditions to find new ways to succeed. Three, conversely, unhealthy cultures do not respond well to change. And last but not least, they found that over time, unhealthy cultures lead to underperformance, or worse, failure. These are the crucial old-economy lessons that start-up CEOs need to internalise.”

Ryan Holiday: “One of the interesting lines in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about using the reins of his horse with his non-dominant hand. He says, ‘You get better from the practice of doing it differently.’ And so, I would argue that part of the reason that book one through book five, there is an evolution there, it’s not just that I did that same thing five times, but I also was working on extracurricular activities that made me a better writer.”

Andy Kessler: “My free-market instincts make me allergic to government intervention. Instead, as in financial markets, government’s role is to set up rules for the sandbox and then let everyone play in it. Let the best sand castle win. Make sure everyone can get in and out of the sandbox on equal terms. We almost have to let Meta or anyone buy companies early in the development of the Metaverse to tinker with applications and business models and prove to others what works, enticing them to join in. If I were the FTC, I’d let Meta, Microsoft or Google make as many acquisitions as they want for the next decade, but only in exchange for open standards and interfaces so that competing firms can build their own version of this space to connect and be interoperable with what already exists. Governments are involved with standards—the National Institute of Standards and Technology is part of the U.S. Commerce Department. But instead of defining details of these new worlds, the focus should be on sensible interfaces and application programming interfaces so everyone can access the sandbox.”

David Perell: “The history of innovation is filled with endeavors that seemed useless at the time: Newton was as obsessed with alchemy as he was with calculus, Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class in college, which contributed to the typeface renaissance Apple would later pioneer…Many of the best scientists are poets. Many of the best investors are philosophers. Many of the best politicians are historians. Though life is random and spontaneous, something in the human psyche expects a linear, ascending staircase towards the penthouse of success. Fearing judgment, people are scared to explore unproven avenues. Second-time authors, musicians, and entrepreneurs struggle because they’re afraid to go back to the beginning and look like a novice again…Honor the dreamer within you and stop trying to justify everything.”

Peter Coy: “What most of us do most of the time is “satisfice,” to use a word coined by the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon in 1956. To satisfice is to satisfy and suffice — to make a quick, easy decision that, while maybe not perfect, is good enough. One quick-and-dirty way to make decisions is to consider a single criterion at a time, rather than trying to weigh all the criteria at once. Let’s say you’re choosing between job offers. Your first criterion might be salary and your second might be distance from home. In that case, you’ll automatically pick the job that pays the most without even looking at how far it is from home. Only if two or more jobs pay the same amount will you move on to the second criterion, distance from home, as a tiebreaker. This is known as lexicographic ordering because it’s similar to the way we alphabetize words. All the words starting with the letter A go in the front of the dictionary. Moving on to the second letter, “aardvark” comes before “abacus,” and so on.”

FT: “The relentless rise of TSMC is one of the most important and least told chapters in the era of globalisation. Different from peers such as Intel and Samsung, which continue to both design and manufacture chips, TSMC is a contract manufacturer that produces semiconductors designed by other companies. The efficiency and cost savings of this foundry model have convinced so many other chipmakers to outsource fabrication to TSMC that Taiwan now accounts for 20 per cent of global wafer fabrication capacity, the single largest concentration in one country, and a staggering 92 per cent of capacity for the most advanced chips. The US share in global chip manufacturing has dwindled from 37 per cent in 1990 to 10 per cent in 2020.”

FT: “[Steven] Pinker argues that humans have a “mythology mindset” when it comes to things outside their personal experience: we are happy to believe things for which there is no evidence. So it is often rational to pander to each other’s irrationality: Republican politicians must pretend not to believe in the 2020 election result. “That’s why we have institutions: like science, responsible journalism, liberal democracy, a court system.” So the problem of rationality is actually a political problem of defending institutions and decreasing partisanship.”

WSJ: “Across the West, we are led by too many inferior people who shouldn’t be left in charge of a Lego set, let alone the entire edifice of national government. Governing has become a heavily performative exercise played increasingly by a cast of professional political figures who never made a payroll, donned a uniform or created anything other than a sharply worded press release. All this is exacerbated by the unseriousness of a media and political culture in which the demand for constant gratification is met by “owning” your opponent, always on the lookout to exploit some alleged grievance.”

Donald Boudreaux: “Precisely because government intervention into markets is intended to disregard or to override market signals, government officials, if they are to improve the welfare of citizens, must have access to information that is superior to that which is available on markets. But government officials, in fact, not only have no superior source of information, they have no good source of information at all. The best they can do is guess. This absence of information available to government officials is an especially acute problem for those officials who fancy themselves able to improve the economy’s performance by nationalizing industries, by using subsidies and protective tariffs, and by imposing ‘corrective’ taxes here and there. But this absence of information is ubiquitous throughout all government affairs. No matter which projects government undertakes as a government, its officials cannot really know, in the way that market participants know, just what to produce, how much to produce, and how best to produce it.”

Indrajit Gupta: “As digital transformation agendas take centre stage, the newsrooms in large incumbent news brands have succumbed to pressures of building traffic, in a bid to chivvy up digital advertising. The reliance on technology tools like Chartbeat to take “data-driven” editorial decisions are rapidly replacing human curation of the past. Journalists in such integrated newsrooms are now given traffic targets. Yet this reckless obsession with page views can be self-defeating, as a major news publisher recently admitted in a closed door session. He said his biggest challenge was retaining loyalty and driving usage. Despite publishing more than 300 stories a day, nearly 95 per cent of his readers read only two stories—and drifted off to other sites. Going forward, my belief is that this dilution of news agendas could create new niches where digitally-led magazine brands could play a big role. The focus will be on building strong communities. Rather than pedestrian, run-of-the-mill events, more engaging formats for live and asynchronous engagement will emerge. Monthly or quarterly print editions could offer a more immersive experience. And new forms of digital story-telling, adeptly curated by editors, will provide the understanding and clarity that data-driven news agenda can seldom guarantee.”