Scott Dyreng: “This term, I am experimenting with AI-assisted tools that are bringing back team culture by using AI to encourage more, not less, human interaction. Teams record their meetings, and internally developed AI tools analyze their interactions. Did one person do all the talking? Did someone interrupt constantly? Did the team ask good questions or slide into polite agreement? Did anyone summarize decisions and assign next steps? Did the team actually debate alternatives or simply divide the work and disperse? When the first results came in, I was blown away. The new tools compelled students to interact and gave them feedback they can use to hone those skills. In the workplace, people often have only vague impressions about team dynamics. In school, we can make patterns visible while students can still change them.”
India Dispatch: “India’s software and IT-enabled exports were roughly $205 billion in FY25, per the RBI’s annual survey of software export companies. The claim that this entire edifice was built on “one value proposition” — cheap developers — highlights great misunderstanding in what these companies actually do for a living. The technology stacks of the world’s largest enterprises are sprawling, non-monolithic, and take years to adapt to each new wave — and the work Indian IT companies do is overwhelmingly not greenfield coding. Custom application maintenance alone accounts for roughly 35% of a typical Indian IT company’s revenue, per HSBC’s service-line framework: incident management, service requests, change requests and problem resolution across architectures where SAP, Salesforce, Snowflake, Databricks, Guidewire and ServiceNow coexist in configurations unique to each client.”
WSJ: “The elements of the periodic table that revolutionised chemistry as a scientific field more than 150 years ago are now at the heart of a momentous modern commercial and geopolitical battle. The contest is playing out from corporate boardrooms planning mining megadeals to US efforts to form a “critical minerals” trade zone to counter China’s influence. Dozens of the world’s nearly 100 naturally occurring elements are in growing demand for crucial industrial uses, making their supply expensive, prone to shortages or vulnerable to international tensions.”
Daniel Coyle, author of Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment: “Things that appear risky on the surface, especially in a business environment where we are averse to risk, actually reflect a deep distinction that not many people understand. We typically suffer from a “straight-line illusion.” Though we think of “complicated” and “complex” as being the same, there’s a profound distinction between those two words. Complicated things come together the same way every time. For example, I can give you the instructions for building a Ford Mustang car. If you have all the materials and you follow the instructions, you will have a Mustang at the end, without question. Complex things change when you interact with them. The question that highlights this distinction is “Is this problem more like building a car, or is it more like raising a teen?” Obviously, there’s no set of instructions I could give you to raise a teen. That’s complex. If you have a complicated system, the best approach is to have expertise. Find an expert who can figure out what to do.”
