Rita McGrath: “One of the great puzzles in business is why some entrepreneurs benefit tremendously from the unfolding of a strategic inflection point, while others who “saw” it equally clearly disappeared into the mists of forgotten business lore. One explanation is that introducing even prescient innovations into an unripe ecosystem is as much a recipe for disaster as failing to innovate in the face of a pending inflection point. Being ahead of one’s time is as miserable as being too late…A strategic inflection point consists of what Andy Grove called a 10X shift in the forces that affect a business. As he pointed out, such a change represents a technological transition in which an older regime is in the process of being replaced by a newer one. If a business is prepared to navigate such a transition, by retiring older technologies, embracing newer ones, and transitioning their activities, an inflection point can represent a valuable opportunity for growth. It can also presage a decline in business as older ways of doing things are replaced with new ones and revenues erode accordingly.”
Atanu Dey on CORE (a curriculum to learn about the economy): “We have to be taught and we have to learn how to think about our world, just like we have to be taught how to read, write, reason logically and do arithmetic. Unlike comprehending and speaking natural languages, we cannot instinctively read, write, reason or do arithmetic; we have to learn. Reading, writing and doing arithmetic is “unnatural.”… India is what it is (desperately poor) because the vast majority of Indians prefer socialism over capitalism. Indians are not systematically stupider or lazier than other more prosperous collectives; they are just systematically more ignorant. Poverty is not necessarily the result of moral failure; most often it is the outcome of a broad-based societal ignorance of basic truths and principles about human nature and society.”
Read: Never by Ken Follett
