Author: Rajesh Jain

FT: “Lego is no longer a pure toymaker. Its products appear in TV shows, films, apps and theme park rides with storylines pitched at boys, girls and, increasingly, adults. “Lego is less about brick-based construction and more about being a talent agency for mini-figures,” says David Robertson, author of the leading book on the company, Brick by Brick. Its revenues — including the Legoland theme parks, controlled separately by Kirkbi — are almost as high as Mattel’s and Hasbro’s combined. For many inside and outside the company, the most obvious rival is now the far bigger Disney. “We have to look at ourselves as an entertainment brand. Our brand characteristics are much more like Disney, the brand strengths are much more like Disney than any more traditional toy competitor,” says Niels Christiansen, Lego’s chief executive who is no relation of the founding family.”

Dr. Rajiv Shah on his book “Big Bets”: “I wrote this book because it is possible to be optimistic about solving some of the biggest problems we face in the world. When you look out there, sometimes it’s easy to be cynical. Can we address the existential threat of climate change? Can we harness new technologies, like artificial intelligence, in a way that lifts people up, as opposed to creating threats? Can we fight hunger and poverty with a sense of purpose and actually succeed? Many of the lessons I’ve learned over the last several decades have taught me that, yes, we can. We can be successful at winning these battles if, in fact, we have a big-bets mindset.”

strategy+business: “The typical strategy cascade often fails to generate the level of clarity, commitment, and action required to move a new strategy forward. To take ownership, teams need more than information or inspiration — they need a specific, personalized license to act. Without clarity on what they are responsible for, which decision rights they own, what inputs they can count on, and who is depending on them to deliver, they cannot move confidently into action. That sort of clarity and commitment requires mutual information-sharing, negotiation, and problem-solving, none of which is the focus in a cascade. It is, however, the hallmark of what I call the chartering approach.”

WSJ: “People seeking information online will increasingly go first to TikTok, ChatGPT and other applications powered by generative artificial intelligence, instead of using traditional search engines, said Michael Wolf, co-founder and chief executive of consulting firm Activate. Today, about 13 million U.S. adults begin their web searches by using generative AI, Activate data show. Wolf predicts that will grow to more than 90 million by 2027 because generative AI is capable of providing results with far greater precision and customization. “Generative AI fundamentally changes the model for search because the results are no longer links,” said Wolf…“It serves up your information totally packaged and ready to use.” Applications rife with customer data will benefit the most from this shift, Wolf said, as they will be better equipped to serve their users with personalized information.”

Arnold Kling: “The nation’s economic statistics include what are called accounting identities. They have to add up. The identity that I will work with here is sometimes called the flow-of-funds identity: Investment = Domestic Saving + Foreign Saving – Government Deficit. This is always true, by the definition of the aggregates involved. Any macroeconomic model or analysis that breaks this identity is nonsense. From now on in this essay, I am are going to leave out Foreign Saving, which is the saving provided to our economy by foreign households and governments as we run a trade deficit. The tricky part of macroeconomics is deciding within this identity what drives what. If there were no government deficit, we would have: Investment = Domestic Saving. In the Classical world, the driver at work is the interest rate. The interest rate has to be just high enough to call forth saving to finance investment. When we bring the government deficit back into the Classical world, we get “crowding out” of Investment. The government borrowing drives up the interest rate, and there is less Investment.”

WSJ: ““Conflict” brings together one of America’s top military thinkers and Britain’s pre-eminent military historian to examine the evolution of warfare since 1945. Retired Gen. David Petraeus, who co-authored the U.S. Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency warfare and oversaw the troop surge in Iraq in 2007, brings a professional eye to politico-military strategy. Andrew Roberts, who has been writing on military leadership since the early 1990s, offers an “arc of history” approach to the subject of mass destruction. The pair’s ambitious goals: to provide some context to the tapestry of modern conflict and a glimpse of wars to come…Many of the elements that “Conflict” dissects—the use of low-cost drones, the targeting of infrastructure, the power of social media and the patronage of outside powers, to name a few—flash across our screens in real time, reminding us that “war is thus still very much worth studying.” Timely, engaging and instructive, “Conflict” is the best one-volume study of conventional warfare in the nuclear age. It sets a new benchmark in understanding modern war.”

NYTimes: “The world’s leading artificial intelligence researchers are transforming chatbots into a new kind of autonomous system called an A.I. agent. These agents can do more than chat. They can use software apps, websites and other online tools, including spreadsheets, online calendars, travel sites and more. In time, many researchers say, the A.I. agents could become far more sophisticated, and could replace office workers, automating almost any white-collar job. This is a huge commercial opportunity, potentially trillions of dollars,” said Jeff Clune, a computer science professor at the University of British Columbia who previously worked on this kind of technology as a researcher at OpenAI, the San Francisco start-up that built ChatGPT. “This has a huge upside — and huge consequences — for society.” Nvidia’s agent plays a game. Similar agents can schedule meetings, edit files, analyze data and build multicolored bar charts. The idea is that these automated systems will eventually act as personal assistants able to handle a wide range of tasks across the internet.”

Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto. “Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die. We believe growth is progress – leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well being. We agree with Paul Collier when he says, “Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.” We believe everything good is downstream of growth. We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death. There are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology…Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.”

Carlo Rovelli: “I study black holes. We see them in the sky today, thanks to spectacular telescopes, but we only see the exterior. We see matter that spirals furiously, before plunging into them. What’s deep inside? What would we see if we entered a black hole and, resisting the crushing forces, fell all the way down? Current science has no answer to this question. Einstein’s theory predicts the end of time down there, but the hole’s inner regions are dominated by quantum aspects of space and time, and these are not taken into account by Einstein’s theory. How can we learn about a place we can neither travel to nor see? To travel to places that we cannot reach physically, we need more than technology, logic or mathematics. We need imagination.”

Matt Abrahams on self-talk: “We all carry around this voice in our head, and the voice is often helping us be successful. But at times, especially under stress and threat, we’ll say really bad things to ourselves. We’ll say things like, “You should have been better prepared. How’d you get yourself in this circumstance? Why are you doing this and not the other person?” And we can actually transform that into something more positive. Athletes do this all the time — mantra, positive affirmation, whatever you want to call it — but by setting up a positive cascade in your mind, it can help you. So, for example, a golfer as he or she approaches a putt might say, “Calm,” or, “Focus,” and that tunes out all of that other chatter. So when I speak, I do this, I use a positive affirmation whenever I speak. In fact, before we started today, as I was walking down to the studio we’re recording in, I said this to myself, “My positive affirmation is ‘I have value to bring.’” I remind myself that there are things I know that others might benefit from. Often, when we’re asked to speak — planned or spontaneous — people want to hear from you because you’ve got something to say and if you remind yourself of that, that could cancel out all that little nagging self-doubt. So, there are things you can do mentally to help yourself.”

Fast Company: “Obsidian’s grassroots success is all the more remarkable given that the app isn’t especially inviting to nontechnical users. While apps like Notion put all your notes in the cloud so you can instantly access them from anywhere, Obsidian gives users a folder full of files and puts them in charge of managing it. Using Obsidian also requires some familiarity with Markdown—a text-editing language with its own unique syntax—and leans on third-party plug-ins for features that are table stakes in other note-taking tools. But that nerdiness is also part of its allure: Once Obsidian endears itself, it’s hard to imagine using much else.”

Human Progress: “Life expectancy before the modern era, which is to say, the last 200 years or so, was between ages 25 and 30. Today, the global average is 73 years old. It is 78 in the United States and 85 in Hong Kong. In the mid-18th century, 40 percent of children died before their 15th birthday in Sweden and 50 percent in Bavaria. That was not unusual. The average child mortality among hunter-gatherers was 49 percent. Today, global child mortality is 4 percent. It is 0.3 percent in the Nordic nations and Japan. Most of the people who survived into adulthood lived on the equivalent of $2 per day—a permanent state of penury that lasted from the start of the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago until the 1800s. Today, the global average is $35—adjusted for inflation. Put differently, the average inhabitant of the world is 18 times better off.”

Alex Connock: “My advice to students is to enter the workplace with a clear view of what value your perspective can contribute, to be AI-literate at every level, but not AI-paranoid. If you approach the future with your own firm vision, then that’s as good as you can do.” [via FT]

Danielle Allen: “I see our many human societies as living on a metaphorical sphere that is half in light and half in dark. The best goal of human striving is to live in the light and to help one’s own society and other societies to live in the light. But always and forever there are forces that pull people and societies toward or downright down into the darkness. And history isn’t linear. Societies are forever moving toward or away from the light on their own distinctive rhythms. They don’t move in sync.To live in the light is to respect human dignity. To recognize and strive to protect basic rights. To empower people to make decisions in their own lives privately and together in public life through democratic forms of governance. To resolve conflict via nonviolent means. To establish the conditions in which safety and well-being for all in a society can emerge, where rule is for the benefit of the ruled, not the rulers. For a society to live in the light is for it to claim these orienting ideals and seek to adhere to them. The effort inevitably falls short. Living in the light also entails a perpetual, internal desire for self-correction.”

The Atlantic: “[Airlines] turned frequent-flier systems into the sprawling points systems they are today. And they turned airlines into something more like financial institutions that happen to fly planes on the side. Here’s how the system works now: Airlines create points out of nothing and sell them for real money to banks with co-branded credit cards. The banks award points to cardholders for spending, and both the banks and credit-card companies make money off the swipe fees from the use of the card. Cardholders can redeem points for flights, as well as other goods and services sold through the airlines’ proprietary e-commerce portals. For the airlines, this is a great deal. They incur no costs from points until they are redeemed—or ever, if the points are forgotten. This setup has made loyalty programs highly lucrative. Consumers now charge nearly 1 percent of U.S. GDP to Delta’s American Express credit cards alone. A 2020 analysis by the Financial Times found that Wall Street lenders valued the major airlines’ mileage programs more highly than the airlines themselves. United’s MileagePlus program, for example, was valued at $22 billion, while the company’s market cap at the time was only $10.6 billion.”

Katharina Pistor: “Finance used to be a means to an end, not an end in itself. From food and housing to family vacations, everything in our daily lives must be paid for one way or another. If we don’t have cash on hand, we turn to a lender for a credit line. Companies do the same. They routinely finance their operations by borrowing or issuing equity stakes to investors, who will part with their money in the expectation of future returns. By bringing these counterparties together, capital markets play a crucial role in the economy. So far so good. But finance is no longer just an intermediary that channels money from savers to borrowers. No longer are its functions confined to putting money in the hands of people who will pledge to pay back the principal, plus interest, in the future. On the contrary, finance is now in the driver’s seat, setting the agenda for others, including governments. There are two big problems with this: finance is both dumb and dangerous.”

40 global technology companies beating their Western rivals. (From Rest of World). “Some of them won by market combat: Years of bruising competition led to lucrative acquisitions by their Western rivals, or acquisitions of the Westerner’s local assets. A few just dominate their sector outright. Others beat the West by paying attention. They saw what foreign entrants missed, and tailored their products and platforms to local user needs with surgical precision. Or they proved a certain model could work in developing economies written off by outsiders.”

Suyash Rai reviews the Make in India initiative, concluding: “It is important to remember that it is very difficult to get industrial policy right, especially in a moderate-capacity state like India. This calls for care and caution. Any strategy of industrial policy implies a particular theory of change, which is underpinned by a view on what objective is worth pursuing, a perspective on how the world works, and assumptions about how policies will be implemented. The theory can be wrong on any of these counts, but the sunk cost fallacy is quite common in such matters, especially in a context where there is a large community of narrative-shapers who are willing to claim success too easily. Therefore, only careful analysis can help the government realize the need for timely course corrections.”

Ruchir Sharma: “If you look at the data, you will see that there is a very clear shift which is going on in the supply chains around the world. But India is not the only beneficiary. India is one of the beneficiaries. (There is) Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico, in terms of being very close to what’s happening to the US, and then in Eastern Europe, (there are) countries like Poland. We have to be careful in India of a couple of things — we are not the only country; there are options people have, markets like Indonesia, Mexico, Vietnam and others. The policy on the ground and the macro numbers look good. If you look at the FDI numbers in India, those have really fallen off quite significantly. Why is that happening? We need more FDI to come. Why is private capex in India not picking up more in the way it should be? These are some of the answers that I hope our policymakers also think about rather than take it for granted… The data on the ground today shows that yes, India is benefiting from the ‘China plus one’ strategy but it’s not just India, there are other countries too which are trying to pick up the pieces and do this… some doing it more quietly, some with more fanfare.”

FT: “[LinkedIn], once a home purely to job hunting and networking, has become overrun with many of its 930mn users sharing career-focused, often aspirational content, in the hope of building substantial followings. Initially the realm of select business magnates such as Richard Branson, lesser-known marketers, tech entrepreneurs and even creatives such as US rapper Snoop Dogg are now trying to leverage the platform. Their success at attracting large followings has caught the attention of some high-profile chief executives, who are also now attempting to build personal brands on the platform and boost the profile of their businesses.”

WSJ: “Unlike some of the more speculative AI visions put forth by nearly every company in tech, Adobe benefits from some of the clearest use cases that could prove especially popular with its user base. The Firefly image generation tool that was just put into beta trials earlier this year is now on its second generation, with new versions announced this week for audio, video and 3-D image creation. New AI features in Photoshop are designed to cut hours from the editing process. And the company now even offers a “conversational” version of its Acrobat software, which can read, analyze and create PDF documents. Mark Moerdler of Bernstein noted that Adobe’s AI tools should result in users “saving hours of repetitive and mundane work.” The trick now is getting enough customers to pay for it—while also not eroding Adobe’s profit margins, which are among the highest in software.”

Matt Abrahams: “Two structures work really well when you are trying to convince or influence somebody. One is intuitive. Many people have used it already. It’s simply problem-solution-benefit. If you’re trying to pitch something to someone, then you can frame the current situation as a problem. You offer your solution, and you explain the benefits of enacting your solution to address the problem. I can frame any issue in the problem-solution-benefit structure and get a pretty good result. There’s a second structure for immediate, imminent, short-form persuasion. It’s the what-if-you-could structure. Imagine you’re in an elevator and someone says, “Tell me about your product. Tell me about your service.” These four sentence starters could help when you don’t have a lot of time. If you finish each of these sentences, you have a really effective pitch. The first part, or the first step, is to think, “What if you could?” Follow up “What if you could?” with “so that.” “So that” invokes the relevance and the reason it is important. “For example” allows you to tell a quick story to reinforce the meaning. The last piece is “And that’s not all.” This lets you paint a picture of what’s possible in the future.”