WSJ: “NFTs, Cryptocurrencies and Web3 are multilevel marketing schemes for a new generation…There’s a paradox at the root of the growing crypto ecosystem—a disconnect between the technology and the economics. While individual digital assets—bitcoins, pictures of “bored apes,” giant JPEGs of everything the artist Beeple has ever produced—can be unique, the underlying nature of the internet means that there is, in aggregate, a potentially infinite supply of cryptocurrency, NFTs and all the other exchangeable tokens that make up “crypto” and the broader vision for a decentralized internet known as “Web3.” Basic economics suggests an unhappy outcome: When the demand for something is limited—there are only so many people on earth, and only so much traditional money to be converted into tokens and cryptocurrencies—and the supply is infinite, the average price of that asset is going to zero.”
David Fubini on the challenges new CEOs face: “I would spotlight three things as the biggest surprises and blind spots for CEOs. One is the importance of arriving with a plan and with a team. I think a lot of CEOs think that they can just arrive and they’ll have a grace period, which, often they find, even if they did have a plan and a team, they’d be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of constituencies and challenges that they have to actually deal with. And they never had time to really go back and get a plan for what they wanted to do. The second is the belief that they get told the entire truth by their management teams. In order to be a good CEO, you have to be a good strategist. You have to make disciplined trade-offs, and you have to know both the positive and the negative to make those trade-offs. It’s surprising how often CEOs are not told the entire negative truth of things, because there is such a desire of their management teams to tell them only the good. So, many CEOs get surprised by the fact that they don’t hear the negative. And finally, I think it’s also a big surprise to lots of CEOs how lonely the job can be. I know that sounds counterintuitive but, really, suddenly CEOs are cut off from a lot of their fundamental mentorship and groups of people that they used to deal with when they weren’t in the most top job in the company. Once you’re in the top job, you really don’t have access to some of those people and staffs that you used to. And it really does get lonely pretty quickly.”
Tiziana Casciaro: “We tend to personalize power and think, “Power is something that I have as a trait. I have certain characteristics that make me a powerful person.” But in reality, power is always relative. It depends on what the other individual in that relationship wants and whether you can provide it. That’s where power really takes shape. It’s not something that we own. These misconceptions are deep—including that power is essentially a matter of manipulation and coercion. It’s a very Machiavellian view that misses the point that power is energy. It’s energy to change the world around you, to take action, to shift people’s behaviors. Power can be used for good or ill but is always in action. It’s always there.”
