Adam Selipsky: “[This is what] AWS pioneered. This concept of not having to be bound by all that stuff you’d have to buy, it changes people’s mindsets. And we’ve seen company after company, because we’ve seen it at Amazon, too, but customer after customer, people telling us, “Yeah, we just start spinning stuff up. We spin stuff down, we run experiments. We understand that some of them are going to fail.” And what happens next is that people inside the company get more innovative, so the company becomes more innovative. And if the company becomes more innovative, that’s the same as saying the culture of the company is changing. And so, when I talk about transformation, yeah, I guess maybe it is a code word. It’s a code word for: you reduce the penalties for failure, you increase the ability to innovate, and you actually get more great new breakthrough ideas per person per month than you used to get before. And that’s a cultural change inside of our customers, which they find to be incredibly powerful.”
Rest of World: “The IITs are now among the world’s top schools. Many young Indians apply for the entrance exams every year. Very few get in. In 2022, the IITs accepted just 1.83% of applicants, a rate more selective than that of U.S. Ivy League universities…Becoming an IIT one-percenter is often a ticket to tech success. Many big names in India’s startup scene are IIT alums. Of the country’s 108 unicorns, 68 were founded by at least one IIT graduate, according to data from analytics firm Tracxn…The IITs’ superpower is their tightly knit network of alums.”
FT: “China is responsible for the production of about 90 per cent of the world’s rare earth elements, at least 80 per cent of all the stages of making solar panels and 60 per cent of wind turbines and electric-car batteries. In some of the materials used in batteries and more niche products, China’s market share is close to 100 per cent. China’s cornering of the clean tech supply chain has drawn comparisons to the high level of influence that Saudi Arabia enjoys in the oil market. Just as petrochemical production provides an immovable strategic buffer for the Gulf state, China’s dominance over these clean energy sectors is adding to growing geopolitical competition and has the potential to complicate the world’s fight against global warming. The stakes are incredibly high. The rise and rise of China’s clean tech companies poses a massive competitive threat to western manufacturing industries, including legacy carmakers and energy giants.”
Matthieu Ricard: “I enjoy every moment of life, but of course there are moments of extreme sadness — especially when you see so much suffering. But this should kindle your compassion, and if it kindles your compassion, you go to a stronger, healthier, more meaningful way of being. That’s what I call happiness. It’s not as if all the time you jump for joy. Happiness is more like your baseline. It’s where you come to after the ups and downs, the joy and sorrows. We perceive even more intensely — bad taste, seeing someone suffer — but we keep this sense of the depth. That’s what meditation brings.”
FT: “In a business or political context it is important to assess what went awry. Not only is this important for learning and testing hypotheses, but it is vital to prevent those that had fatal consequences — such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill or the Boeing 737 Max crashes, for example — from being repeated. “The overwhelming desire is to move forward to the next success,” said Amy Edmondson, a leadership and management professor at Harvard Business School, [author of] Right Kind of Wrong... “But it is worth the time to do the work and see what needs to change to prevent that failure happening again.” An admission of failure is the first step to analysing, unemotionally, how something went wrong and how to improve.”
