Economist: “Just as oil was weaponised by its suppliers in the 1970s, so China’s dominance in the supply and processing of critical minerals could prove threatening. Cobalt, graphite, lithium, nickel, the rare earths and more are called critical for good reason. They are crucial to defence, smartphones and other digital technologies. A handful are essential to wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles. A clean-energy future is inconceivable without them. China has a near monopoly on many of these minerals. It supplies nearly 90% of processed rare-earth elements. It is by far the biggest processor of lithium. In the Indo-Pacific region, this is driving Australia, Japan, South Korea and others to seek to diversify away from China—in the process defining a new resource-based geopolitics.”
Rita McGrath: “In genuinely uncertain conditions, the only way to learn is by trying things out. That means having a hypothesis about what could happen, undergoing an experience that tests that hypothesis and then finding out whether the hypothesis was supported, or not. As I’ve said for a long time, failing (as in trying something out that didn’t work out the way you’d hoped) is the only way to learn in genuinely uncertain environments. It’s what Sim Sitkin called “intelligent failures” and is indeed a class of failure that Amy [Edmondson] talks about in her book…Stop the blame game. Design experiments that reflect real life. Stop imposing the expectation of meeting plans on people doing things in unpredictable environments. Recognize that failure maybe needs to be re-defined.” From the book description: “We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well. After decades of award-winning research, Amy Edmondson is here to upend our understanding of failure and make it work for us. In Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson provides the framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely. Outlining the three archetypes of failure—basic, complex, and intelligent—Amy showcases how to minimize unproductive failure while maximizing what we gain from flubs of all stripes. She illustrates how we and our organizations can embrace our human fallibility, learn exactly when failure is our friend, and prevent most of it when it is not. This is the key to pursuing smart risks and preventing avoidable harm.”
WSJ: “Is future you…you? It might seem like a strange philosophical question. But the answer to how you think about your future self could make the difference between decisions you ultimately find satisfying and ones you might eventually regret. A growing body of research suggests that in many ways, our future selves can seem to us like other people, even strangers. To get a sense of this, try picturing your next birthday, and then picture your birthday 20 years from now. In both cases, you probably visualized typical things associated with a birthday: a cake, a celebration, family, friends. But in the first, you probably see the scene unfolding in front of you; in the second, if you are like many people, you might picture yourself as a separate person…The larger lesson here is clear: If we can treat our distant selves as if they are people we love, care about and want to support, we can start making choices for them that improve our lives—both today and tomorrow.”
Andy Kessler: “United started 2023 with 93,000 employees. In May the company announced it expects to hire 15,000 people in 2023 and add a total of 50,000 new workers by 2025 as the company grows internationally. None of the new hires will manually sort tickets. If United were still sorting, there would be no way to hire any new workers, let alone expand internationally. The sorting problem, which would grow exponentially with size, would have eventually frozen the company in its tracks…Without productivity, growth grinds to a halt. I know it sounds like a paradox, but it isn’t: United had to get rid of jobs to create new jobs. Today, United is an airline, not a sorting company…Big daunting tasks are doable. It is worth the hassle to get rid of jobs to create new jobs and grow. And there are always benefits you can’t yet see. Beyond the cost savings from not handling tickets, United got customers to do the work themselves: checking in, picking seats, dealing with mobile boarding passes. Payments and refunds now settle quickly. Airlines can bypass travel agents through websites. And I’m sure there is much less fraud. As artificial intelligence and robots begin to permeate industry, remember these lessons.”
Reid Hoffman: “We’re going to have a whole bunch of tools that help teachers, help grade, a bunch of other stuff. But even if you took ChatGPT today, say I was wanting to teach a class on Jane Austen and her influence on English painting. What I could do as a teacher — go to ChatGPT, other AI bots, construct 10 essays with my own prompts, hand them out to the students and say, “These are D pluses. Go use the tools and make it better” as a way of doing it. That’s the way that you could still have homework. They’re using ChatGPT, and it causes them to be much better at thinking about what makes a great essay, as opposed to just the mechanics of all the writing. What could I innovate on the structure? Could I have a bold or new contrarian point and argue it in an interesting way?”
