Economist: “South Asia’s largest economy is surprisingly stable. This year the country has been both a victim of President Donald Trump’s trade war, singled out for especially punitive tariffs owing to its purchases of Russian oil, and a participant in a shooting war with nuclear-armed Pakistan. Its economy has barely noticed. Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka are all participating in IMF programmes, along with Pakistan. Meanwhile, India’s ten-year government bonds yield less than 7%, down slightly from the start of the year and far below the 12% that Pakistan and Sri Lanka are forced to cough up. India’s foreign-exchange reserves sit at around $700bn, or 18% of GDP—sufficient for 11 months of imports. Growth ticks along at 6-8% a year.”
Mint: “Indian companies are raising conditional payouts in total salaries and making sharper distinctions between top and worst performers…“Organizations now prefer a ‘we earn; you earn’ mentality. When the volatility of business outcomes is high, the volatility of compensation is also high. This helps firms avoid an overload of fixed compensation costs in their profit and loss,” said Pawan Dinkar, a director at professional services provider Deloitte India, who focuses on executive performance and rewards.”
FT: “Obscure questions about business scenarios have long featured in interviews for top graduate schemes in consultancies and banks. Now, applicants to McKinsey are being asked to go further — by role-playing as conservationists. The activity is a central scenario in an online assessment now given to applicants to the consultancy. McKinsey’s patented assessment simulation, Solve, judges prospective hires on their performance in a computer game that simulates a virtual ecosystem. It is one of several immersive, game-based tests being introduced alongside, or in place of, traditional hiring assessments at some of the world’s biggest employers. The approach, quietly adopted in sectors from banking to policing, reflects a shift towards assessing practical skills in an attempt to find more diverse candidates and prevent applicants using artificial intelligence.”
SaaStr: “The best investments often come from going against the grain. If everyone is chasing AI at any price, maybe the real alpha is in the overlooked T3D2 SaaS business that you can get at a reasonable valuation.”
NYTimes: “The tech industry tells us that chatbots and new A.I. search tools will supercharge the way we learn and thrive, and that anyone who ignores the technology risks being left behind. But Dr. Melumad’s experiment, like other academic studies published so far on A.I.’s effects on the brain, found that people who rely heavily on chatbots and A.I. search tools for tasks like writing essays and research are generally performing worse than people who don’t use them. “I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.” Welcome to the era of “brain rot”…Rather than ask a chatbot to do all the research on a broad topic, Dr. Melumad said, use it as a part of your research process to answer small questions, such as looking up historical dates. But for deeper learning of a subject, consider reading a book.”
