WSJ: ““Humans need fun,” Keza MacDonald writes in “Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play.” “We are playful animals.” That’s the thesis of her history of Nintendo, the company that during the 1980s changed videogames by making “Donkey Kong,” “Super Mario Bros.,” “The Legend of Zelda” and, yes, “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!” Over the next 30 years, the company would release several new game systems, including the Game Boy hand-held system, the Wii and the Switch. These were usually not the most technically advanced devices on the market but often the most affordable and approachable. Ms. MacDonald, who writes the “Pushing Buttons” newsletter for the Guardian, argues that Nintendo “represents an uncomplicatedly fun approach to video games, a bridge back to the central joy and excitement of childhood play in a world that is increasingly pressured and fraught.” Ms. MacDonald’s love for the company—the book ends with a ranking of her 50 favorite Nintendo games—can veer toward blinkered adoration. But her enthusiasm can also be catching.”
Venu PSV: “Disruption is a foundational feature of business. Businesses become great by overcoming disruption, protecting their moats and delivering returns…There is clearly a need for a model that gives space for opposite forces to be weighed in. HiHo model looks like 4 key dimensions – Help, Hinder, Input and Output. To the Help Vs Hinder and Input vs Output dimensions, we add 1st and 2nd order effects to allow for time lapse that supports evolution, adoption and adaption.”
NYTimes: “For a quarter century, India has made itself the world’s back office, providing an educated, English-speaking work force to do tasks more cheaply than in the United States or Europe. The industry today employs more than six million people and is worth nearly $300 billion, more than 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Now, A.I. threatens to do to India what its outsourcing model did to the rest of the world: replace hundreds of thousands of office workers. Economies everywhere are bracing for an era in which A.I. tools automate entire categories of white-collar work, but the brunt could fall hardest on India, undermining two decades of effort to climb the value chain and establish a place in the global tech world.”
WSJ: “The workplace can be a tricky place to navigate. Almost everything we do at work—identifying the experts, managing tough feedback from a boss, figuring out how to work in teams made up of different personalities—comes down to our ability to manage relationships. And to do so, we need savvy social skills. But the newest workplace generation—Gen Z—is unlike anything we’ve seen. Through a combination of having fewer real-world relationship experiences, spending their education years in remote environments, and learning to communicate largely through asynchronous methods, these 20-somethings have missed opportunities to develop the skills needed to navigate the complex world of work. The result is that many are woefully unprepared for surviving—let alone thriving—in their jobs.”
