Rich Lesser writes [in a BCG newsletter] about How Change Really Works: Seven Science-Based Principles for Transforming Your Organization, by Julia Dhar, Kristy Ellmer, and Philip Jameson: “Leaders continue to face pressures to improve near-term performance while sustaining vitality and longer-term growth. They are also making enormous bets on technology and AI investments. How these programs are delivered will define their organizations and shape their legacies—and none of it works unless they also get the people side right. ”
FT: “[Chris] Hohn, 59, is perhaps the closest thing Britain has to Warren Buffett, the legendary US stockpicker. His Children’s Investment Fund (TCI) has become the fifth most profitable hedge fund of all time, last year bringing in more profits after fees than any other firm. Yet unlike its behemoth rivals Citadel and Millennium that employ thousands of people, his fund has done this with around half a dozen elite analysts and one all-powerful portfolio manager at the helm…Like Buffett, Hohn focuses on big companies with powerful moats that help them stave off competitors. He also holds his positions for an average of nine years, a timeline more akin to a private equity firm than a trader. But unlike Buffett, Hohn spurns a whole host of industries, including banks, utilities, media and insurers. Hohn says there are perhaps just over 200 companies in the world that are investable and, because of the uncertainties fomented by AI and climate change, that figure is decreasing.”
Paul Romer: “The set of things there are out there to discover, is just so incomprehensibly large that we’ve only begun to explore the tiniest subset of possible ideas or discoveries…Just ask yourself, how many mixtures could you make out of the periodic table? …there are more mixtures like that than there have been seconds since the Big Bang created the universe…There are more possible DNA sequences than there are elementary particles in the universe…For as far as you want to project into the future of humans, we won’t run out of new things to discover.” [via Arnold Kling]
WSJ: “One reason the U.S. boasts the world’s most valuable companies and promising startups is because the government doesn’t seek to punish success—or handcuff entrepreneurs with regulation as the Europeans do. China boasts enormous human capital, but Beijing’s financial markets are stunted by the desire for political control. See Alibaba’s Jack Ma. America also has the world’s deepest capital markets. U.S. public equity markets boast an aggregate market cap of some $70 trillion, more than twice as much as all of Europe’s stock markets. Who knows if Mr. Musk will every colonize Mars, but the surest bet is never to bet against American innovation.”
