Ajai Shukla: “For New Delhi, China’s new aggressiveness presents a clear dilemma: Should India continue to build strategic and military relations with the United States and the partnership of America, Australia, Japan and India — known as the Quad — even though Beijing has made it clear it sees the Quad as an anti-China grouping? While the Quad, and its more overtly militaristic version, the AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States) alliance, constitute a viable deterrent to China in the maritime Indo-Pacific theater, India is the only partner that confronts China on its land border. From New Delhi’s perspective, the Chinese military aggression on the disputed border is the price India is paying for joining hands with the Western alliance. New Delhi takes pains to portray its independence, even turning down an American offer of assistance against China at the time of the 2020 intrusions in Ladakh. New Delhi has restricted Indo-U.S. cooperation to the realm of intelligence and privately asked Washington to lower the rhetoric over China. This is unlikely to change.”
Debashis Basu: “Why are even experts so bad at predicting effects, not just causes? Because economies and markets are not static systems following physical rules; academics describe as complex, emerging, adaptive systems. The impact of any major external event causes millions of people to react and interact in a chain-like process known as a feedback loop. The effects of such continuous interaction to ever-changing external factors are obviously impossible for a human mind to grasp and predict. So, the next time you come across an apology for a wrong forecast like “who would have predicted…”, remember that even if we had predicted the cause, the forecast for the effect would have probably been wrong.”
Peter Fader, et al (HBR): “As you analyze your firm’s revenues and profits, or as you make plans for the future, what’s your unit of analysis? At too many firms, analyzing the data of individual customers gets short shrift. Management reporting systems make it easier to focus on other things, and the organizational structure can make other metrics a priority. (If you have a person in charge of online sales, it feels natural to judge his or her performance by channel metrics.) This lack of focus on individual customer data is often a mistake. Revenues are generated by customers pulling out their wallets and paying for your products and services. Revenue is the sum of the value of all the customer transactions that occurred in a given time period. Many firms recognize the need to think differently about using customer data, but they do not know where to start. They are often trapped in an old-fashioned view of their business, structured around products or channels. How do you approach the task of getting your people to shift their perspective and start thinking about your firm’s performance using the customer as the atomic unit of revenue and profitability? We have found that performing a customer-base audit is a fundamental catalyst for change.”
Raamdeo Agrawal: “If [India’s] nominal GDP is growing at 12% compounded, it will double every six years. That’s the power of compounding. From around ₹260 trillion, in six years’ time, it will be upward of ₹500 trillion. In that bigger pool of rupee economy, who wins? Who loses? And that’s where you have to visualize which businesses and companies are going to have a great time. Like, say, in the banks, private sector banks are going to be better play in the next 10 years than PSU banks. In the near term, it is different, but per se, the competence is on the side of unlimited tech spending and leadership. And, so, in banking, my sense is the private sector will win, and within the private sector, it’s the likes of Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank where you will have to make the call. Which one of these is going to be a really superior growth machine, a superior money-making machine—bigger and faster? That’s the game of wealth creation.”
Ray Schultz: “The email field has been slow in taking on AMP—one expert called it “dead on arrival.” But many marketers are moving toward interactivity in emails. To make the case for AMP, brands can use it to offer web-like experiences within an email, including click-to-submit NPS surveys, newsletters with collapsible content, swipe-able gallery experiences, travel booking, and zero-party data collection.”
NYT: “In 1938, researchers at Harvard set out to learn what makes a person thrive. They recruited 724 participants, a combination of students at Harvard College and low-income teenage boys in Boston. All were willing to let the researchers track their lives, from childhood troubles to first loves to final days. Every five years, the researchers gathered health records from the participants. They asked detailed questions about their lives at two-year intervals, and, in later years, took DNA samples and performed brain scans. Twenty-five of the participants even donated their brains to the study after their deaths. Now, 85 years later, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has expanded to three generations and more than 1,300 descendants of the original subjects; it is, according to the researchers, the longest-running in-depth study on human happiness in the world. From all the data, one very clear finding has emerged: Strong relationships are what make for a happy life. More than wealth, I.Q. or social class, it’s the robustness of our bonds that most determines whether we feel fulfilled.”
