Steve Correa & Ajay Kelkar: “Reflection and vulnerability are essential in leadership. During a leadership programme, one of us resisted words like “care” and “empathy,” which felt unfamiliar. Yet, these softer qualities strengthened his leadership, helping him connect more deeply with his team. If you want to enhance your coachability, ask yourself: Are you open to feedback, even when it challenges your beliefs? Have you successfully adapted based on past feedback? Improving coachability is a journey of self-reflection, adaptation and daily practice. Embrace this process, and you’ll find leadership growth to be a continuous and rewarding path. Being coachable is often about ‘stopping doing’ rather than ‘starting to do’ a few more things.”
Business Standard: “India’s recent struggles with reform are also, at their root, about land. India has a similarly inflexible land market. In fact, it has no land market as such; land use is determined by bureaucratic diktat, and there is no secure record of ownership. But, unlike China, local governments will also struggle to build land banks or borrow against it. Here, if anyone captures value from land, it is not rentiers but the middlemen linked to politicians and bureaucrats who can influence the change of land use notification. The outcome is that neither the private nor the public sector can easily transform or build on land. Agriculture is low-margin and investment in industry is low in large part as a consequence of these restrictions on land ownership and value extraction.”
Debashis Basu: “Permanent changes being highlighted by stock-market experts, such as a strong banking system, a strong current account, low inflation, a controlled Budget deficit, and a low debt-to-GDP ratio, don’t hold up on closer scrutiny. Now the data shows that the Indian economy remains a cyclical play after all; there has been no fundamental transition to higher income through higher productivity and improved competitiveness. After all, prosperity is not India’s birth right. We need to do the hard work of raising rural incomes through agricultural reforms, make mass manufacturing cheaper, and exports competitive. These are nowhere on the agenda. But the popular narrative is that this is “India’s century” or “India’s era”. If growth reverts to the pre-Covid level, a lot of people may have to temper their rosy optimism.”
FT: “Leading artificial intelligence companies that are racing to develop the cutting-edge technology are tackling a very human challenge: how to give AI models a personality. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have developed teams focused on improving “model behaviour”, an emerging field that shapes AI systems’ responses and characteristics, impacting how their chatbots come across to users. Their differing approaches to model behaviour could prove crucial in which group dominates the burgeoning AI market, as they attempt to make their models more responsive and useful to millions of people and businesses around the world. The groups are shaping their models to have characteristics such as being “kind” and “fun”, while also enforcing rules to prevent harm and ensure nuanced interactions.”
