WSJ: “In “Profit From the Source,” four Europe-based partners at Boston Consulting Group—Christian Schuh, Wolfgang Schnellbächer, Alenka Triplat and Daniel Weise—make the case for drastic change. Procurement, they assert, has been badly neglected: “When the boss offers someone a job in procurement, they know they’re on the fast track to nowhere.” Top executives, they claim, spend far too little time with suppliers, even though purchasing swallows more than half of the average company’s budget. “That’s a mismatch with potentially existential consequences,” they write. Instead, they insist, companies should put procurement at the center of corporate strategy.”
The New Yorker: “The effectiveness of the TikTok experience is found in what it doesn’t require. Unlike Twitter, TikTok doesn’t need a critical mass of famous or influential people to use it for its content to prove engaging. The short-video format grabs the user’s attention at a more primal level, relying on visual novelty, or a clever interplay of music and action, or direct emotional expression, to generate its appeal. And, unlike Facebook, TikTok doesn’t require that your friends already use the service for you to find it useful. Though there are some social features built into TikTok, they’re not the main draw of the app. TikTok also doesn’t rely on its users to manually share content with friends or followers to surface compelling offerings. It assigns this responsibility to its scary-good recommendation algorithm…This rejection of the social-graph model has allowed TikTok to circumvent the barriers to entry that so effectively protected early social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By separating distraction from social connection, TikTok can directly compete for users without the need to first painstakingly build up an underlying network, link by link.”
Atanu Dey: “I love America but I hate the American government with a passion that only rivals my hatred of the Indian government. What saves America is that Americans have made America so prosperous that even its government could not ruin it even though the government has been trying its best to ruin it for the last half century. Indians, unfortunately, were not able to overcome the government oppression to that same degree, and they continue to suffer.”
