David Brooks: “Let’s be clear about what’s happened here: greed. Americans have become so obsessed with economic success that we’ve neglected the social and moral conditions that undergird human flourishing. Schools spend more time teaching professional knowledge than they do social and spiritual knowledge. The prevailing values worship individual choice and undermine the core commitments that precede choice — our love for family, neighborhood, nation and the truth. There’s a lot of cultural work to do.”
FT: “The VC playbook goes as follows: Stage one: find a brilliant computer science student with an instinctive entrepreneurial drive and a neat business idea. Stage two: award said student a Thiel fellowship to drop out of university, co-found a start-up with a geeky friend and lure them both to California. Stage three: inject VC money into the start-up to develop a compelling product and to scale up the business fast. Stage four: take the company public, generating spectacular returns for the original investors. Figma’s story has not been quite as simple as that but it certainly rhymes.”
Ben Thompson: “To go back to the smartphone paradigm, the best way to have analyzed what would happen to the market would have been to assume that the winners of the previous paradigm would be fundamentally handicapped in the new one, not despite their previous success, but because of it. Nokia and Microsoft pursued the wrong strategies because they thought they had advantages that ultimately didn’t matter in the face of a new paradigm. If I take that same analytical approach to AI, and assume that the winners of the previous paradigm will be fundamentally handicapped in the new one, not despite their previous success, but because of it, then I ought to have been alarmed about Apple and Amazon’s prospects from the get-go. I’m not, for the record, ready to declare either of them doomed; I am, however, much more alert to the prospect of them making wrong choices for years, the consequences of which won’t be clear until it’s too late. And, by the same token, I’m much more appreciative of Google’s amorphous nature and seeming lack of strategy. That makes them hard to analyze — again, I’ve been honest for years about the challenges I find in understanding Mountain View — but the company successfully navigated one paradigm shift, and is doing much better than I originally expected with this one.”
strategy+business: “The word burnout gets thrown around pretty loosely, often referring to the exhaustion and disillusionment with work that many of us experience at one time or another versus a chronic, debilitating syndrome. Maslach and Leiter frame and define this syndrome as arising from mismatches in the relationship of employees with their jobs. They identify three dimensions of this relationship: the capability dimension, which is governed by workload and control; the social dimension, governed by reward and community; and the moral dimension, governed by fairness and values. When any one of these dimensions break down (like when you add managing a global pandemic to your workload as leader of a country and your constituents start sending you death threats and you can’t be the parent you always wanted to be), the result, write the authors, can be “an employee experience of a crushing exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and alienation, and a sense of ineffectiveness—the triumvirate known as burnout.””
