strategy+business: “Lean’s many benefits extend well beyond the assembly line. And, as a new book argues, its qualitative approach to enterprise improvement has never been more relevant. What a Unicorn Knows, by Matthew May and Pablo Dominguez, applies lean’s core principles—developed more than 50 years ago—to today’s digital-first, “subscription-based, technology-as-a-service economy.” Indeed, the authors claim that their lean framework is the ideal bridging tool; by embracing it, “startups become ScaleUps, ScaleUps become unicorns, unicorns become grownups ($1 billion+ in revenue, 1,000+ employees), and grownups recapture the spirit and growth of a unicorn.” May and Dominguez put lean’s time-tested practices to work through a framework called SCALE: Strategic Scale, Constant Experimentation, Accelerated Value, Lean Process, and Esprit de Corps. Arguing that lean-derived principles support rapid and lasting growth for digital-first companies, the authors draw from established practices, such as Hoshin Kanri, the strategic-planning process that emphasizes a coordinated approach to ensuring that a company’s strategic goals are driving progress across the organization.”
WSJ: “Middle East monarchies eager for global influence are having a moment on the world’s financial stage. They are flush with cash from an energy boom at the very time traditional Western financiers—hampered by rising interest rates—have retreated from deal making and private investing. The region’s sovereign-wealth funds have become the en vogue ATM for private equity, venture capital and real-estate funds struggling to raise money elsewhere.”
Erik Torenberg on liberalism: “The great problem in society is how you deal with conflict. We use markets to determine who has economic resources. We use democracy to determine who has political power. And we use science to determine who has truth.” [via Arnold Kling]
Economist: “Wealth management is all the more appealing because of how quickly it is expanding. The world economy has grown at a decent enough clip over the past two decades, at more than 3% a year. Yet it has been left in the dust by growth in wealth. Between 2000 and 2020 the total stock rose from $160trn, or four times global output, to $510trn, or six times output. Although much of this wealth is tied up in property and other assets, the pool of liquid assets is still vast, making up a quarter of the total. Bain, a consultancy, estimates that the pool will expand from just over $130trn to almost $230trn by 2030—meaning that a $100trn prize is up for grabs. They expect the boom to help lift global wealth-management revenues from $255bn to $510bn.”
Economist on networking for introverts: “The real secret is to save your energy for the people who are most likely to be interesting to you. In the online realm, for instance, Dr Rajkumar’s study does not find that the weaker the tie, the better. The sweet spot in networking on LinkedIn is someone with moderately weak ties to you: connecting with a person with ten mutual friends markedly increases the probability of changing jobs compared with someone with just one shared friend. In other words, networking pays off if you can identify people who can bring you new information but are close enough to your world that this information is useful.”
