WSJ: “Research on both basketball and business teams suggests that successful teams tend to rely too much on the stars…Together, our two studies suggest that success threatens teams. What can leaders do? We have three evidence-based recommendations: Build an egalitarian culture. Review your results. Think long term.”
FT: “During the excavation of Pompeii, among the villas and streets that lay intact under the ash from the eruption of Vesuvius in 79CE, a small statue of a female figure was found. Made from ivory, it bears the single letter sri in the Kharosthi script that was used in north-west India and probably represents the goddess Lakshmi. For Martin Puchner in Culture: A New World History, this discovery reveals the cross-fertilisation of cultures that has always happened — not only in the Roman empire, but long before: cave paintings in Chauvet, southern France, show how humans made meaning across the generations. But as the Roman empire expanded, so the exchange of cultural ideas and objects occurred at geographical scale, “drawing people living thousands of miles apart into a single network”. The Romans’ desire for luxury goods extended not just to silk and spices but also statues of Indian goddesses. In turn, Roman coins have been found in India.”
Randy Holcombe: “Markets enable people to coordinate their activities so that individuals can make use of the knowledge of others without having that knowledge themselves.” [via CafeHayek]
Chris Best (Substack CEO): “We’re building a new economic engine for culture. We’re building a new part of the internet that’s based on different laws of physics, like a different business model — subscription instead of ads. It’s a different way of relating to people, where you subscribe directly to the people you trust rather than signing up for the platform as a whole. And the potential of that thing to really change the world and to inspire people to want to be a part of it is really compelling. And we’ve always had a very concrete next step of something that we could do that gets us an inch closer to that vision. And at the very start, it wasn’t “build an enterprise software thing”; it was, “help one person turn on page descriptions in their email newsletter.” It was the very smallest instantiation of, “Well, but now that I’ve turned on paid subscriptions in my email newsletter, I own my audience. I have a connection directly to them, I can reach them in their inbox. I can bring my email list with me, I can import it, I can export it. I can get paid directly by my audience. That changes the game of what kind of stuff I’m allowed to create.””
