HT: “India’s urbanisation needs to be centred on 4E outcomes — Economic growth and job creation; Equitable access to services and opportunities; Environmental sustainability; and democratic Engagement. Balancing these 4Es in the larger cities calls for metropolitan governance that can overcome spatial and functional fragmentation through single-point political accountability. Failure to do so will have real implications in terms of loss of economic productivity and potentially even gradual decay, worsening congestion and air pollution, and exacerbating climate effects like flooding. The government of India must, therefore, assume active leadership in evolving a model of metropolitan governance for the country.”
Mint: “GenAI is not just about chatbots: The transformer method is ushering the world into a broader machine era. This is not just about the arrival of chatbots and copilots, but about a fundamental shift in our relationship with technology. There will be missteps, mal-investments and market bubbles aplenty, but we need a genuine understanding—as against historical pattern fitting—at every level to benefit from these trends. For nations, communities, families and corporates, GenAI is likely to consume decision-making more than almost anything else in the coming decades, with the gains disproportionately favouring those acting appropriately and early. Of course, this comes with all sorts of concerns, from the environmental footprint of building large global brains to the ethical implications of humanoid robots. In other words, we are in an era of hyperchange, which may make the era of change between the early 90s and mid-2000s look like a mere trailer.”
McKinsey 2024 tech trends outlook. Among them: Applied AI, Industrializing machine learning, and Next-generation software development.
John Mackey, cofounder and former CEO of Whole Foods: “I regret the circumstances that made selling to Amazon the very best option. If I had to go back in the same circumstances, though, we’d make the same decision. Our shareholder activists told us, “We’re going to take over your board, fire your management team, and sell the company to the highest bidder.” I thought we could resist. That was one of the paths not taken. But we needed time to turn our business around. We needed to lower our prices, and that was going to be painful. The other option we had was to go private, but that would have taken us billions and billions of dollars in debt. I woke up one morning and I thought, “I wonder if Amazon would be interested?” And I got super excited because I admired Amazon. I admired Jeff Bezos. We had a tremendously good connection. So, we contacted Amazon to see if they’d be interested. They were very excited about it. It happened pretty quickly. Six weeks after our very first meeting, we signed an agreement to merge. But I always wonder if we’d fought, could we have stayed independent? At the time, my job was to look for the win–win–win solution for the stakeholders, including the investors. This [ended up being] a good thing for our customers. We lowered prices four times in the first two years. It was good for our team members. They all got a raise. It was good for our suppliers because we continued to do business with them. Amazon.com picked up many of our suppliers. It was good for our shareholders because they got about a 40% price increase. So, it was truly a win–win–win.”
