Rajesh Jain

Angela Duckworth: “You cannot change the conditions of modern life, but you are the sovereign of what enters your personal space. Physical distance creates psychological distance: Draw close what you want more of; push away what you want less.”

Roger Rosenblatt: “Books are houses. Once inside, you’re transformed, and you become the house you entered. I open the doors of “Jane Eyre,” and I’m ushered into the manse of the cold and brooding Rochester. Eventually he thaws, and I grow to like him, feeling comfortable in the house. But what’s that manic laughter coming from the attic? Just like the various places you have lived in, a good book can never be removed from your memory…My books are teachers but also companions who know more than I do, and who in the long run wish me well. I would no sooner get rid of them than I would an old friend.”

Andy Kessler: “The 20th century was characterized by industrial might, lowering the cost of manufacturing, transportation and computing. The 21st century so far has seen spectacular growth by lowering the cost of information and maybe even knowledge. Here are five mules pulling this century along: Asynchronous, Asymmetric, Asymptotic, Assimilative, Asymptomatic.”

Mint: “Three important shifts are quietly underway in India that could shape the economy through 2026 and beyond. One, even as the world is becoming more protectionist, India is opening up: At a time when many countries are turning inward, India is moving in the opposite direction. Over the last year, it has been cutting import tariffs on intermediate inputs, trying to fast-track trade deals with various countries and becoming more open to foreign direct investment (FDI) across sectors. These steps can have sizeable benefits because the nature of trade itself is changing—in a way that can work to India’s advantage, particularly if it continues to signal openness.”

Rohit Lamba: ” India has long grappled with GDP expansion that fails to generate commensurate employment. The US experience suggests this is not merely a developing-country affliction — it may be the structural reality of capital-intensive, technology-driven growth everywhere. If India’s demographic dividend is to yield returns, growth must be labour-absorbing. GDP targeting alone is insufficient. If a productivity boom is indeed underway, the challenge is institutional: Ensuring its gains translate into shared prosperity.”

Animesh Koratana: “Context Graphs Are Organizational World Models. There’s a concept worth taking seriously because it reframes what context graphs actually are: world models. A world model is a learned, compressed representation of how an environment works. It encodes dynamics, ie. what happens when you take actions suspended in a specific state. It captures structure: what entities exist and how they relate. And it enables prediction: given a current state and a proposed action, what happens next?”

Manu Joseph: “There is an assumption in India that high standards are not appropriate in a country with poverty. That only keeps us poor. There is a lesson in this. Individuals, especially the poor, should think big, be grand and look much above their station.”

Frank Bruni: The Best Sentences of 2025

FT: “The mining company De Beers declared almost 80 years ago that “a diamond is forever” — and now the marketing slogan has a twist for the quantum age. The durability that made the stone sought-after in jewellery for millennia is being exploited to turn it one day into a state-of-the-art sensor allowing us to read brainwaves, navigate without satellites and diagnose diseases faster and more effectively. This dawning era for diamonds relies on an inversion of the qualities of regularity that have long made it prized for its beauty. By introducing tiny imperfections into its highly ordered crystalline structure, scientists can make it an extraordinarily sensitive detector of subatomic quantum phenomena.”

SaaStr: “We talk a lot about what’s driving the fastest-growing AI startups. Is it the technology? The timing? The TAM expansion? All of that matters. But it’s also something that’s easy to overlook because it’s almost too obvious: The best AI B2B startups are delivering ROI so insane, so immediate, so undeniable — that you don’t need an ROI calculator to justify the purchase.”

NYTimes: “Rare earths are a family of elements toward the bottom of the periodic table, with tongue-twister names like neodymium and dysprosium. They are used in powerful magnets, lasers, M.R.I. machines and other instruments. And while they are not actually rare, they are difficult to process into usable forms. China refines more than 90 percent of the world’s rare earths, a level of control that is of growing concern to Western governments and businesses.”

Mint: “For years, ecommerce discovery was built around keywords, rankings and sponsored slots. Now, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google Gemini are guiding users on what to buy, where to buy it and at what price, often without opening a marketplace app. That has forced online retail giants from Amazon and Flipkart to Meesho to tweak how their products show up, not just for shoppers, but also for chatbots. AI answers often list, at most, three options. “If you’re not in the answer, you don’t exist for that user,” said Sohom Banerjee, senior research associate at CUTS International, an industry forum. “Unlike Google, where result #5 still gets traffic, AI sharply narrows visibility.””

FT: “How do you change a company’s culture? It is visible behaviour and actions, not communication and messaging, that changes minds.”

Adam Grant: “The responsibility of leadership is too important to entrust to arrogant people. Narcissistic leaders deny their weaknesses and make themselves weaker. Humble leaders admit their weaknesses and make themselves stronger. Great leaders overcome their weaknesses and make us all better.”

ET: “The era of rapid-fire executive poaching is cooling, as corporate India enters a period of deep caution. For senior and middle management, the path to a new corner office in 2026 will be defined by gruelling vetting processes, artificial intelligence litmus tests, and a “last-in, first-out” anxiety that is keeping potential candidates from jumping ship. The shift marks a departure from the aggressive expansion seen in previous years. Executive search firms said that the timeline to close a senior mandate now frequently exceeds six months, as boards prioritize operational resilience over headcount growth. In a bid to de-risk high-stakes appointments, hiring panels are increasingly looking outside their own industries. The goal is to find “disruptors”—leaders who have navigated market volatility or digital transformation in other sectors and can apply those lessons to new environments.”

FT: “Dealing with uncertainty is arguably as much about developing an outlook or mentality as it is about market research or the unending quest for better data. General (later US President) Eisenhower summed up this tension well. “In preparing for battle,” he said, “I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Why are plans useless? Clearly situations change. Competitors innovate or pitch their products at aggressive new price points. Wars break out causing commodity prices to rise. Governments introduce new legislation that changes the game. Formerly free and open markets get hit with tariffs. So why is planning indispensable? The discipline of trying to anticipate what could happen is valuable in itself. This helps develop the much-prized “agility” that so many corporate leaders want their organisations to display. An extreme version of this planning approach is to carry out a “pre-mortem” ahead of the launch of any new project or initiative. This involves imagining a time in the future when the project has failed. What is it that will have gone wrong? Which misguided assumptions did you make? Which bit of bad data led you astray?”

Bloomberg: “Step aside, artificial intelligence. Another transformative technology with the potential to reshape industries and reorder geopolitical power is finally moving out of the lab: quantum. The United Nations dubbed 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. It’s been marked by a flurry of announcements — and a mountain of hype — around a mind-boggling field of science long dismissed as perpetually a decade away from usefulness. But that’s how people talked about AI, too, before ChatGPT spurred the current global arms race and investor euphoria.”

Mint: “The most significant technological shift will be in the biological realm, as synthetic biology starts being used to replace the chemical processes we currently rely on. This means that we will soon be able to ‘brew’ what we need by using precision fermentation and cell-free enzymatic systems, allowing us to ‘manufacture’ on demand whatever chemicals, fabrics, fuels and food we need. This will disrupt the current industrialized production system as we shift to distributed bio-manufacturing ecosystems in which neighbourhood ‘brewers’ produce our pharmaceuticals, fabrics and food. When this happens, our economic growth could finally be decoupled from resource extraction, marking the end of the ‘Age of Oil.’”

The New Atlantis (as part of “How the System Works series): “Farming is one of our species’ oldest activities, dating back roughly 13,000 years. About six thousand years ago, farmers began using draft animals — horses, oxen, and so on. For millennia after that, what farmers did in their fields changed little. But in the 1960s and 1970s, in what is called the “Green Revolution,” research scientists, government agencies, agricultural businesses, and farmers themselves put together a new, strikingly more productive version of agriculture — Farming 2.0, if you will. Today, Farming-2.0-style agriculture — which began with innovations in field crops like wheat but spread to other parts of farming, such as cattle ranching and chicken-raising — is by almost any measure the world’s most critical industry. It is directly responsible for our daily bread. But despite its overwhelming importance, Farming 2.0 is in many ways unknown to most of us, because it has been so smoothly successful that we have almost no picture of the underpinnings of the vast system that provides us with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Too few have any sense of its scope, what brought it into existence, and in what ways it will need to change.”

Bloomberg obit: “[Lou] Gerstner slashed costs and sold off unproductive assets, including real estate and IBM’s collection of fine art. He fired 35,000 of the 300,000 employees, who had become accustomed to a culture of lifetime tenure based on principles established by former CEO Thomas Watson Sr. in the early 20th century. He stressed company-wide teamwork to replace the tradition of loyalty to various divisions, and he pegged compensation to corporate performance rather than individual results. To meet performance goals, he emphasized regular accountability rather than waiting for yearly performance reviews. “People do what you inspect, not what you expect,” he said.”

Hilton Root: “This review essay engages Two Paths to Prosperity (Greif, Mokyr & Tabellini, 2025) and develops an alternative, mechanism first account of the Europe-China “Great Divergence.” Two Paths to Prosperity explains Europe’s ascent through cultural-institutional coevolution, where corporate forms internalized values that enabled impersonal exchange. This essay reframes that account, using instead a comparative historical model of mechanisms. It argues that the Europe–China divergence hinges on how belief was translated into enforceable cooperation—through distinct architectures of authorization, selection, diffusion, and sanction (ASDS)—rather than on differences in religious and moral creeds alone. The framework reveals a recurring contrast: Europe’s plural corporate ecology scaled trust via lateral incorporation, while China’s lineage–state compact stabilized order via vertical accountability. The result is higher causal resolution and a set of testable implications across regions and regimes.”

Activate Signal: “If 2024 was India’s AI awakening, 2025 was the year the world woke up to India. Hyperscalers committed $80 Billion+. Frontier labs began opening offices. Government compute went live at scale. And in February 2026, India will host the Global AI Summit — a signal that India is no longer just participating in the AI era, but helping shape its global agenda. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: despite all this momentum, India still lacks a single homegrown hyper growth native-AI company clocking $100M+ ARR. And this is when the country is now ChatGPT’s second-largest market, Anthropic’s second-largest by usage, ElevenLabs’ second-largest by enterprise revenue and Perplexity’s largest by user base. The question for 2026 isn’t whether India matters to global AI. The question is whether Indian companies can capture the value being created, or whether it concedes a lot of that to US-based frontier labs and big-tech.”