Adam Grant on the new work environment: “We need boundaries to protect individual focus time too. On remote teams, it’s not the frequency of interaction that fuels productivity and creativity—it’s the intensity of interaction. In a study of virtual software teams by collaboration experts Christoph Riedl and Anita Woolley, the most effective and innovative teams didn’t communicate every hour. They’d spend several hours or days concentrating on their own work and then start communicating in bursts. With messages and bits of code flying back and forth, their collaborations were literally bursting with energy and ideas. One effective strategy seems to be blocking quiet time in the mornings as a window for deep work, and then coming together after lunch. When virtual meetings are held in the afternoon, people are less likely to multitask—probably in part because they’ve been able to make progress on their own tasks.”
Ninan: “Election results and “wallet economics” seem less synchronous in India than elsewhere. Tamil Nadu with a superior performance threw out its ruling party, while Kerala with relatively bad performance re-elected the Left Front. On the other hand, look at nationwide elections. India wasn’t “shining” enough for the BJP to win in 2004. The subsequent years of rapid poverty reduction got the Congress re-elected in 2009. Five years later, the onset of a slowdown helped usher in Narendra Modi. And he remains popular though per capita consumption has been stagnant for four years. Perhaps his skill at alternative narratives (hard work, infrastructure, welfare measures, identity politics) makes the difference. So people don’t ask themselves whether they were in fact better off four or five years earlier. That’s how it often works out with charismatic leaders.”
Michael Munger: “Economic revolutions do not care what we think of them. For people who believe they are the centre of the universe, or for technocrats who want to pull strings and push levers to ‘run things’, that can be very disquieting. But failing to understand that economies are organic complex systems can cause problems that make things much worse. These systems have internal dynamics that operate independently of the will of the state, or of any individual for that matter.” [via CafeHayek]
