FT: “CEOs turn to podcasts to control their message…Increasingly popular corporate shows allow bosses to speak out in a less formal setting…Communications specialists say podcasts can encourage executives to speak more openly and on a more personal level. This can offer listeners — who typically include employees, shareholders as well as customers and industry specialists — an unfiltered view of the person running the company. “The open-ended format lets executives bring their commentary to life with all sorts of material that might otherwise get left on the cutting-room floor — anecdotes, book references, you name it,” says Joshua Rosen, at communications firm Prosek Partners. “Detours and rabbit holes aren’t just welcome — they’re encouraged. And so there is more room to show depth and breadth, that you are an authority on your industry, but that you also see the bigger picture.””
Economist: “Two big shifts are under way in the world of software development. Since the launch of Chatgpt in 2022, bosses have been falling over themselves to try to find ways to use generative artificial intelligence (AI) productively. Most efforts have so far yielded little, but one exception is software programming. Surveys suggest that developers around the world find generative ai so useful that already about two-fifths of them use it. The profession is changing in another way, too. A growing share of the world’s engineers come from emerging markets. There is no standard definition of a developer, but around 2020 the number of users of Github, a popular platform for storing and sharing code, living in poorer countries surpassed those from the rich world. On the same measure, in the next few years India is expected to overtake America to become the world’s biggest pool of programming talent.”
Manu Joseph: “Why don’t we see new religions today? Has the time of religion passed? I don’t think that is the case. New religions are all around us, they just don’t look like religion yet. They exist as moral ideas, if not mystical. Many centuries later, dominant religions would probably involve the fierce adoration of nature, or maybe a theological veneration of socialism. Their seeds are already here. And like Buddhism of a time, they do not appear to threaten any incumbent religion.”
Mint: “Hardly 4% of India’s workforce has any certified skills, compared to over 70% in most European countries and over 90% in some East Asian economies. Numerous skilling programmes launched over the years have had little impact on actual employment because potential employers, who know what skill gaps need to be filled, have not been involved at the core of these efforts. A new programme announced in the budget that will subsidize apprenticeship in large companies in the organized sector sounds promising. Whether these companies will register with the government to participate in this programme, however, remains to be seen. Finally, this forward-looking programme should focus on preparing India’s workforce for the three fundamental technological revolutions that will shape the emerging global economy: the energy transformation, bio-technology revolution and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution.”
