R Gopalakrishnan: “Obliquity flashed in my mind as I read the book, Afterness, by former Hindustan Unilever chief Ashok Ganguly, though the book has no allusion to that term. Dr Ganguly states that he never dreamt of becoming a scientist, he never targeted how to rise in his corporate career, and he did not aim to serve as a scientific advisor to the Prime Minister. Yet, all these things happened in his life. He hints that if we focus diligently on doing what we need to do in our jobs, somebody else will manage our career and progress. It could be that the employer company takes care, or that Lady Luck or God will be watchful. After we have run the course of our careers, the wisdom of obliquity dawns on us. Psephologists and economists realise how wrong their prediction models were, business leaders realise how misguided they were about the centrality of their own role in achievements, and politicians realise how much froth and blah they had deployed to seduce their voters. Professor Kay says that obliquity “describes the process of achieving complex objectives indirectly…. happiness is where you find it, not where you go in search of it.””
A K Bhattacharya: “India’s governance structure…allows very little room for local governments like the municipal corporations. As a result, the third tier of governance (the first two being the Centre and the state governments) has grossly inadequate powers of raising resources to fulfil its basic responsibilities. Worse, most of these municipal corporations do not even show much interest in using their existing powers to tap into new sources of revenue to fund the schemes that they must run for the upkeep of the municipalities. Two consequences follow. One, the performance of municipal corporations suffers hugely. They are often short of funds to even pay salaries to the staff at the many agencies and organisations they run to provide basic services to people like primary education, health and sanitation. The second consequence is worse. These corporations become more dependent on financial allocations from the state governments. If the allocations dry up, the corporations fail to discharge their basic functions. And if the municipal corporation is ruled by a political party other than that running the state government, the financial consequences are serious.”
Hayek: “Unless we are willing to restrict the powers of government even in respects where it might be used for good purposes, we shall not succeed in preventing an indefinite growth of government powers. To allow everything which seems expedient for the achievement of a desirable end is to dispense with all moral principles. The submission to rules which must be observed irrespective of whether in the particular instance their infringement is harmful or not, is the main condition for the possibility of order in a free society. And to these rules the state should be no less subject than the individual.” [via CafeHayek]
Tim Martinez: “Larry Greiner’s Growth Model states that each new level of “growth” creates a new crisis which he identified as: Crisis of Leadership – moving from start up mentality to a more well defined management style. Crisis of Autonomy – management becomes siloed and more interested in the business unit vs the whole. Crisis of Control – Owner/Operators find it difficult the relinquish control. Crisis of Red Tape – Bureaucracy, excess of reports, broken systems, etc slow growth. Crisis of Growth – how to continue growing as a mature, successful company?”
Siddhartha Mukherjee: “Being able to manipulate that basic unit of pathology becomes vitally important as we move forward because it allows us to manipulate, not at an organ level, but at the level of what constitutes the organ. Take CAR-T cells [chimeric antigen receptor T cells used in cancer treatment]. If you’re making a CAR-T cell, you’re extracting a vital part of the immune system, changing it using gene therapy, and then returning that same cell into the body so that it can perform a function. In the past it would be unimaginable because you would have no mechanism really to grow these cells outside the body, to change their parameters, and then return them to the body, and treat a disease like cancer, using this level of cellular manipulation.”
