Author: Rajesh Jain

Adam Grant: “When it comes to email, however, most of what’s in your inbox is less urgent than it appears. In a series of experiments, the researchers Laura Giurge and Vanessa Bohns demonstrated what they call an email urgency bias. When people received emails outside work hours, they thought senders expected faster replies than they did. The more recipients believed they needed to respond quickly, the more stressed they felt — and the more they tended to struggle with burnout and work-life balance. The stress was mitigated when senders took a simple step: communicating their expectations. Just saying something like “This isn’t urgent, so get to it whenever you can” was enough to alleviate the perceived pressure to respond quickly…When we place too high a priority on the speed of our email replies, we destroy our ability to focus. Interruptions derail our train of thought and wreak havoc on our progress. When you know you don’t have to reply to emails right away, you can actually find flow and dedicate your full attention where you wish.”

Economist: “[Twenty years on], the Human Genome Project revolutionised biology…Genomics has…come to form a framework for biology in the way that the periodic table forms one for chemistry. It touches everything. And with that, the ambitions for their subject of those biological prophets of the 1980s are being fulfilled in a manner they could scarcely have dreamed of.”

Alok Kshirsagar: “Five factors stand out from McKinsey’s experience with founders in India and around the world who have scaled up to build organizations that endure. They build a structure designed for growth. They create new ways to collaborate. They get talent right. They foster a distinctive culture: They adapt their leadership model.”

Thomas Friedman: “in today’s fused world, the notion that China can economically collapse and America still thrive is utter fantasy. And the notion that the Europeans will always be with us in such an endeavor, given the size of China’s market, may also be fanciful…As for China, it can tell itself all it wants that it has not taken a U-turn in recent years. But no one is buying it. China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized, deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor.”

Nathan Baschez: “What holds a social app together? Ask any tech enthusiast and they will quickly tell you: network effects. Put simply, social apps allow us to communicate with familiar faces in a familiar way, and they make it easy to meet new people. Starting a new social app is kind of like starting a new town: it’s just a bunch of empty space at first. This is why most social apps fail. New networks usually are formed when a new way of communicating is enabled by a technology shift. Broadband internet and flash video enabled YouTube. SMS enabled Twitter. Mobile photography enabled Instagram. Today it feels like we’re living through another important cultural shift—the decline of Twitter—and a new generation of networks are experimenting with new structures to try and capitalize on it. If we want to understand what’s next, it helps to ask: What caused the culture shift? What new structures would be better? And what will it feel like to use the internet in the future?”

NYTimes: “We do remain dependent on traditional gig labor, a fact that blazed into our collective consciousness with the pandemic and our sudden reliance on workers like delivery drivers. What is less often appreciated, though, is just how much, and how steadily, the structure and technology of gig work have expanded beyond our most obviously “Uberized” jobs. The gig economy, at this point, encompasses not just drivers or repairmen, not just designers or proofreaders, but also retail workers, the armies of itinerant nurses who crossed the country to shifting Covid hot spots and even white-collar professionals like lawyers and consultants. Whether they seem like “gigs” or not, countless varieties of jobs are sliding into the ecosystem of the gig — the world, broadly defined, of technology-enabled temporary employment — and steadily loosening the ties between workers and employers.”

WSJ: “With the new generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, anyone can put in a prompt—type in a few words and get a result. But that doesn’t mean that the results will be relevant or accurate. The key is putting in the right prompt. The fact that you can communicate with the latest AI systems in plain English “is very deceptive,” says Peter Lin, a computer-science professor at the University of Waterloo. That’s why some businesses are now hiring prompt engineers—people with the skills, background and practice to talk to so-called large-language AI systems effectively—and why many people expect prompt engineering to be a desirable skill for many kinds of workers to add to their resumes.”

FT: “As co-founder of the database software company, Ellison had long owned around a fifth of the stock. Then, just over a decade ago, Oracle started repurchasing its shares in earnest, ploughing much of its free cash flow — along with tens of billions that it borrowed — into one of the biggest buyback programmes in corporate history.  Simply by sitting on his holding and not selling, Ellison has seen his personal stake increase steadily, to reach 43 per cent of Oracle…Along with a history of solid if unspectacular earnings, this judicious financial engineering has boosted the value of Ellison’s stake more than three-fold. His personal fortune has soared to more than $100bn, making him the world’s fourth-richest person, according to Forbes.”

Rita McGrath: “I’ve been studying corporate innovation efforts that go wrong for years. And the pattern is very common – it’s trying to force-fit new things into the model that works well for things that are predictable. So a company has a great idea (or what it thinks is a great idea). It immediately puts a big team on it, fully funds it, creates an 18 month launch plan and perhaps issues a big splashy announcement, before you’ve done any of the thinking that’s need to reduce uncertainties (a point also made by our friends Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner). What do you get then? Untested assumptions, taken as facts. Few validated demonstrations of market desire for the things. Completely nonsensical commercial plans. Fear of the competition dominating decision-making. And I could go on. It’s perhaps not surprising that so many would-be whiz-bang innovations end up getting shut down when anyone looks under their proverbial hood.”

Casey Rosengren: “This is one of the beautiful and painful parts of building a company–at some point, your comfort zone becomes the bottleneck in your business. Either you grow as a founder (and a person), or the company plateaus. Whether you’re just starting out or are running a billion-dollar business, success depends on your ability to tolerate discomfort.”

WSJ: ““How did you go bankrupt?” Bill Gorton asks the wastrel Mike Campbell in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” “Two ways,” Campbell replies. “Gradually, then suddenly.” Our fiscal course is in the “gradually” phase. We don’t know whether or when “suddenly” will come, but it would be reckless to assume that it won’t. Countries don’t go bankrupt the way individuals and companies do, but they experience something similar when creditors are no longer willing to buy their debt at a decent price. During decades of low and declining interest rates, loose fiscal policy didn’t have the consequences that pessimists predicted—higher interest rates and crowding out of private-sector borrowers—but this era has come to an end…Our kids will inherit a nation less financially sound than it was when we were born.”

Bloomberg: “Once synonymous with the crisis that brought on an Asia-wide financial meltdown a generation ago, Thailand gets almost rave reviews now. This relative resilience of its economy may be tested by a pronounced downturn and a re- awakening of the country’s deep political divisions. Calamity appears to be the last thing on investors’ minds when they think of Thailand these days. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. even likened the nation to a “safe haven.” Among the kingdom’s attributes are a resurgence in tourism, low foreign debt and a surplus in the broadest measure of trade. That’s a halo historically associated with Switzerland, Japan or prized asset classes like US Treasuries. The baht, whose nosedive in 1997 wrote the opening chapter in an emerging-market upheaval, was one of the most sought-after Asian currencies last quarter.”

Economist: “On a whole range of measures American dominance remains striking. And relative to its rich-world peers its lead is increasing…though purchasing-power parity (PPP) is the right metric for comparing people’s well-being in different economies, in terms of what those economies can achieve on the world stage it is exchange rates set by markets that count. And looked at this way, American pre-eminence is clear. America’s $25.5trn in GDP last year represented 25% of the world’s total—almost the same share as it had in 1990. On that measure China’s share is now 18%…More astonishing, and less appreciated, than its ability to hold its place in the world as a whole is the extent to which America has extended its dominance over its developed peers. In 1990 America accounted for 40% of the nominal GDP of the G7, a group of the world’s seven biggest advanced economies, including Japan and Germany. Today it accounts for 58%. In PPP terms the increase was smaller, but still significant: from 43% of the G7‘s GDP in 1990 to 51% now.”

WaPo: “There is no one thing that will ensure healthy cognitive aging, but all these factors are interactive, researchers said. If we start chipping away at the dementia risks and pile on protective factors, we can reap positive effects. Here are some that may help: Eat like a centenarian by incorporating fiber-rich foods and nuts into your diet. Exercise your body. Exercise your brain. The brain loves a challenge, so do activities that engage your noggin. Stay connected. Social isolation and loneliness are risk factors for dementia, while social contact is protective. Foster resilience. When something bad occurs, try to embrace the challenge.”

FT reviews We Need to Talk About Inflation: “Stephen D King’s highly readable and informative book provides a welcome antidote. Its title is spot on. We should talk about inflation, not least because of its arbitrary incidence. It penalises thrift and rewards profligacy. It makes planning difficult. And it enables government through sleight of hand to impose stealth taxes through freezing tax thresholds and real wage cuts on its employees. King’s canter through 2,000 years of inflationary history — from Emperor Diocletian’s debasement of the coinage through to the Federal Reserve’s decision in 2021 to allow inflation to run at above the 2 per cent “central target” — is instructive. Money matters. Print too much and inflation generally follows. But sadly the quantity of money and inflation is not so correlated as to make monetarism — the strict control of supply — an effective policy guide.”

WSJ: “Welcome to the next wave of remote work. During the pandemic millions of Americans worked from home and many decamped to cities like Boise, Austin and Phoenix. Companies learned that employees could be productive from afar, thanks to remote-working tech like Zoom and Dropbox. Those moves were usually at the behest of workers who wanted a change of environment, sought more living space or somewhere cheaper. Companies agreed to these arrangements largely to retain employees in a competitive labor market. Now companies are responding to lingering labor shortages and rising wages by sending jobs overseas, according to labor consultants.”

strategy+business reviews The Entrepreneurs: The Relentless Quest for Value: “Drawing on thousands of years of entrepreneurial history, from “the Neolithic bead-producing people of Wadi Jilad” to Marie Tussaud, [Derek] Lidow argues that social trends have been central to invention. It was the development of a materialistic class of consumers that enabled entrepreneurs such as Josiah Wedgwood to mass-produce fine branded products in the 18th century. And the evolution of urban centers at the turn of the 20th century allowed Harry Selfridge to create the idea of the modern department store by innovating ways to attract and serve customers. Lidow underlines that entrepreneurs, counter to conventional wisdom, don’t go it alone. His notion of “entrepreneurial swarming” holds that it is often groups of enterprising people who collectively transform society through reinforcing behaviors. “Much of the world we live in today was created by swarms of entrepreneurs relentlessly innovating,” he writes, pointing to the chipmaker Robert Noyce. Noyce partnered with a group of like-minded technologists in Silicon Valley in the late 1950s to create the integrated circuit that would become the foundation of the Information Age.”

William Gladstone in 1890: “Protection says to a producer, Grow this or manufacture that at a greater necessary outlay, though we might obtain it more cheaply from abroad, where it can be produced at a smaller necessary outlay. This is saying, in other words, waste a certain amount of labor and of capital; and do not be afraid, for the cost of your waste shall be laid on the shoulders of a nation which is well able to bear it.” [via CafeHayek]

Economist: “Regardless of size, all family companies face common challenges. Filial loyalty and multi-generational thinking can morph into resistance to change, and if a firm has outside shareholders, clash with their interests. The process of generational transition can be particularly draining and frustrating to the staff members who are not family, raising uncomfortable questions about social mobility, or the lack thereof…Ultimately, being entrusted with a business by people who share your DNA is something you ought to earn, not expect. As the adage goes, “A family business is not a business you inherit from your parents, it is a business you borrow from your children.””

Arnold Kling: “I think of humans as playing many games. These games become much more complex and subtle as the scale of society increases from small bands to groups larger than the Dunbar number, all the way to nations. Moreover, I think that the Internet and social media have altered the playing field for these games. There used to be a stronger separation between: the intimate world of our friends, family, and co-workers on the one hand; vs. the remote world of politicians and celebrities on the other hand. Now, on our smart phones we find celebrities acting like our friends and our friends acting like celebrities.”