Category: Thinks

WSJ: “[The] brainstorming exercise is, in fact, a terrible idea—not only because I can’t hear you. The value of gathering to swap loosely formed thoughts is highly suspect, despite being a major reason many companies want workers back in offices. “You do not get your best ideas out of these freewheeling brainstorming sessions,” says Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School. “You will do your best creative work by yourself.”…Business teams ought to collaborate, of course, but she interprets the evidence to mean that colleagues should compare notes after extensive, independent thinking.”

Dan Shipper: “Education is expensive because you’re paying for more than learning. You’re paying for the status of the degree, the ability to participate in the community, a planned course list and curriculum, the quality control that the university provides, and on and on. You’re paying for a turn-key, minimum effort experience. But if, for some reason, you don’t care about those things and you’re optimizing primarily for learning—you can learn anything 98% better than you would in a class, for significantly less money. The way to do this is through 1-1 tutoring.”

Economist: “The advances of generative-AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, have left just about every investor discussing what to make of the incipient industry, and which firms it might upturn. Mr Son sees parallels with the early period of the internet. Generative ai could provide a new pipeline of initial public offerings—and the foundation for the next generation of mega-cap tech firms. Investors face two questions. The first is which frontier technologies will make market leaders a fortune. That is difficult enough. The second, establishing whether the value will accrue to upstarts backed by venture capital or existing technology giants, is at least as tricky. Nobody knows if it is better to have the best chatbot or plenty of customers—having a head start in a whizzy new tech is not the same as being able to make money from it. Indeed, lots of the value of revolutionary innovation is often captured by existing giants…As things stand, it looks more likely that the market value of the technology will end up as a new string to the bow of already giant tech firms.”

WSJ: “Inflation has been running at its highest rate in decades. American society is restive and divided. There’s a public perception that the country’s glory days are over, that democratic capitalism is a spent force. U.S. standing and influence abroad are in decline. America not long ago withdrew in disgrace from one of the longest wars in its history. A communist superpower appears ascendant and is building up military force at a ferocious pace. William Inboden could be talking about today, but he’s describing the world in 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president. “If you were to do an overall scoreboard in the Cold War at the time,” he says, “it would have looked to most objective observers like the Soviets were winning and the United States was losing. At best it’s a tie, but the previous decade had been by most standards a good one for the Soviet bloc and a bad one for the free world.”…A decade later, the Soviet Union collapsed.”

Thomas Sowell: “What is called “capitalism” might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance with it.” [via CafeHayek]

WaPo: “Beneath 1,350 square miles of dense jungle in northern Guatemala, scientists have discovered 417 cities that date back to circa 1,000 B.C. and that are connected by nearly 110 miles of “superhighways” — a network of what researchers called “the first freeway system in the world.” Scientist say this extensive road-and-city network, along with sophisticated ceremonial complexes, hydraulic systems and agricultural infrastructure, suggests that the ancient Maya civilization, which stretched through what is now Central America, was far more advanced than previously thought. Mapping the area since 2015 using lidar technology — an advanced type of radar that reveals things hidden by dense vegetation and the tree canopy — researchers have found what they say is evidence of a well-organized economic, political and social system operating some two millennia ago.”

Anticipating the Unintended: “[Recently], the [Indian] government announced another PLI scheme for “laptops, tablets, all-in-one PCs, servers etc.”, with a budgetary outlay of ₹17000 crores over six years. If the government appreciated technological learning, it would accompany this PLI with a reduction in customs duties. Competitive exports need competitive imports of intermediate components and equipment.”

Dan Wang: “China is achingly aware of its deficiencies in two strategic sectors in particular: semiconductors and aviation. So it has showered these sectors with bountiful money and stern policy attention. Where has that gotten them? Not far. On chips, China has built the basics of the industry, but is at best 10 years behind the leading edge of manufacturing logic chips, and even more on the tools needed to produce chips: lithography equipment and EDA software. On aviation, China’s answer to Airbus and Boeing has been years behind schedule, and is anyway substantially dependent on western engines and avionics systems…I would say that China has caught up with the west on nearly all manufactured products outside of chips and aviation. It is making sophisticated electronics components. It is making boring industrial equipment that rarely grace headlines. And it is making most of the technologies we need for decarbonization. The folks at Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimate that China owns 90% of the solar supply chain: everything from polysilicon production to the tools needed to make photovoltaics to the panels themselves. It’s also doing very well in batteries and has a shot at dominating the hydrogen supply chain as well.”

Rita McGrath on questions a Board should be asking before an acquisition: “What assumptions are we making about future demand? What is the evidence that these are warranted? How will the two companies truly integrate? What are the customer touchpoints that will be valuable for both? How do we make the customer jobs-to-be-done better? And of course, what evidence do we have that there really is synergy between the two operations, so that owning both adds up to more than the cost of making the deal?”

Suzy Welch: “My equanimity was recently tested for the first time in a while, with graduation looming and summer almost upon us, when my students started throwing around the term “funemployment.” As in, “I’ll work when I work, until then, I’ll just do some funemployment…The idea that not having a job, or even the prospect of one, could be pleasant, delightful and, yes, even desirable? This seems a level step up from wanting work-life balance. It makes even quiet quitting—which is really another way of saying, “I want to work 9-to-5 in an 8-to-8 industry”—seem tame.”

FT: “Based on its own research, [Price’s Rajesh] Shukla’s group estimates that there are about 432mn middle-class Indians — about one in every three people. The range of what Price ranks as middle class is large: household income of between 500,000 and 3,000,000 rupees (about $6,700 to $40,000) a year. This is enough, says Shukla to “have achieved economic security and be able to indulge in discretionary consumption”. Shiv Shivakumar, operating partner at private equity firm Advent International, extrapolates the size of the middle class starting from the number of income tax returns and an average household size of 4.4 people. He then adds another 100mn to 200mn non-taxpaying people in agriculture (what he calls the top income layer of the nearly 1bn Indians who live on the land) and reaches an estimate of 356mn to 456mn people.”

Economist: “Mr Kissinger has some opening advice to aspiring leaders: “Identify where you are. Pitilessly.” In that spirit, the starting-point for avoiding war is to analyse China’s growing restlessness. Despite a reputation for being conciliatory towards the government in Beijing, he acknowledges that many Chinese thinkers believe America is on a downward slope and that, “therefore, as a result of an historic evolution, they will eventually supplant us.” He believes that China’s leadership resents Western policymakers’ talk of a global rules-based order, when what they really mean is America’s rules and America’s order. China’s rulers are insulted by what they see as the condescending bargain offered by the West, of granting China privileges if it behaves (they surely think the privileges should be theirs by right, as a rising power). Indeed, some in China suspect that America will never treat it as an equal and that it’s foolish to imagine it might.”

Eliot Peper: “Notes are short. You’ve got to be able to fold them into a paper airplane you can throw to a friend when the teacher isn’t looking, or, you know, fit them into a tweet, adapt them into a TikTok, or post them as an Instagram story. Notes are about one thing, although they can be about anything: gossip, advice, ideas, doodles, quotes, lists, questions, insults, insights, etc. Notes are written for specific people, not for everyone. You write notes to friends, crushes, enemies, and frenemies, but never to some abstract “audience.” Often, the more specific your note, the farther it travels, because there are other people like your friend, crush, enemy, and frenemy on the internet, and they will feel like it was written just for them. Whether you’re on Reddit, iMessage, Discord, Gmail, YouTube, Notion, or Mastodon, the internet is a place for passing notes—a giant note router.”

FT: “Higher interest rates have so fundamentally shifted the financial environment that investors must focus on a company’s ability to maintain margins rather than just its growth prospects, veteran private equity executive Chip Kaye said. “This moment is different than anything we have had in the 40 years before . . . with inflation proving stickier and interest rates higher than currently expected — and more complicated great-power politics adding to that dynamic,” said Kaye, who started at Warburg Pincus in 1986 and has been its chief executive for two decades. “If you could pick one characteristic of a business and that’s how you decide whether to invest, it would be pricing,” he told the Financial Times. “Lean into businesses that feel like they have the ability to adapt to a higher-inflation environment.””

Bloomberg: “[Robert] Lucas’s primary contribution was to insist that all assumptions about expectations be spelled out and tested to see if they were consistent with all other parts of the argument. For instance, if you wanted to assert that people would respond to one set of government actions but not another, you had to outline why that might be the case. In retrospect it seems simple, but Lucas (with co-authors, notably Nancy Stokey) was the person who showed how to do it. The end result was a reworking of virtually everyone’s macroeconomic arguments — monetarist, Keynesian or otherwise. The “Lucas critique” showed that policy changes alter how people behave, and thus affect the operation of the economy. Policy, in other words, should not be thought of as manipulating a fixed target: There is always an economic response to any policy, and so doing good macroeconomics is harder than previously thought.”

Economist: “The Lucas critique can be explained with the help of an analogy—one he offered to students graduating from the University of Chicago, where he spent many years as both a student and professor. Imagine a fairground that sells tokens at the entrance for the rides inside, all of which are independently run. Suppose the cashier abruptly doubles the number of tokens per dollar. Fairgoers, flush with tokens, will flock to the rollercoaster, fun house and other attractions. Some ride operators will assume their rides are more popular than they thought. They might even extend workers’ hours in order to handle the additional custom. A statistically minded economist looking at the park’s data might conclude that an increase in the token supply leads to heightened activity and employment. They might even advise other fairgrounds to try the same trick. But of course this “policy” only works because ride-operators do not anticipate it. As they realise what is going on, they will raise the number of tokens they require per ride. Prices will rise and activity will return to normal.”

Noah Smith: “If you went back to 1973 and made a cheesy low-budget sci-fi film about a future where humans sit around looking at little glowing hand-held screens, it might have become a cult classic among hippie Baby Boomers. Fast forward half a century, and this is the reality I live in. When I go out to dinner with friends or hang out at their houses, they are often looking at their phones instead of interacting with anything in the physical world around them. Nor is this just the people I hang out with. Just between 2008 and 2018, American adults’ daily time spent on social media more than doubled, to over 6 hours a day..About a third of the populace is online “almost constantly”.”

Lokiniti-CSDS post-poll survey on Karnataka (in The Hindu): “Survey data show that unemployment was the biggest voting issue for voters in the State. Asked an open-ended question, close to three in 10 voters (30%) stated unemployment to be the biggest issue while voting in this election. Poverty stood at a distant second, with 21% saying that it was the biggest issue. Price rise was mentioned by 6% of voters as the main issue, thus bringing economic issues to the fore, with nearly 60% voters drawing attention to economic issues more generally…In the 2018 Assembly election, a mere 3% voters reported unemployment to be an issue. For the majority (27%) of voters, development was the biggest issue. Back then, no issue, other than development crossed double digits. This corroborates the fact that unemployment was one of the major pressing issues for voters in this election.” ET: “The exit poll conducted by Axis My India shows that the top three factors influencing those who voted for Congress were change (10%), inflation and poll sops (9% each).”

Raghu Raman: “Happiness comes from many sources like material acquisitions, social validation, satisfaction of achievements, etc. but probably the most effective of them all is a sense of gratitude for the blessings we were given and curses we were spared. There is an old parable about Emperor Akbar and his courtier Birbal in which Akbar draws a line on the wall and challenges his court to shorten the line without touching it in any manner. Eventually after everyone fails, the wise Birbal walks to the wall and draws a line much longer than Akbar’s next to it and says, ‘There… your line is shorter now’. Most of us belong to a minuscule Indian minority who have already won a big lottery of life, and at an intuitive level, we know it. However, like any value system or culture, this source of happiness and joy also needs structured rituals that constantly remind us of why we should be happy and radiate that happiness within our spheres of influence. And spending physical time in a sustained cadence with those less fortunate and if possible helping them out is perhaps the most effective ritual of finding joy.”

WSJ: “A once-in-a-generation convergence of technology and pressure to operate more efficiently has corporations saying many lost jobs may never return…Companies are rethinking the value of many white-collar roles, in what some experts anticipate will be a permanent shift in labor demand that will disrupt the work life of millions of Americans whose jobs will be lost, diminished or revamped partly through the use of artificial intelligence. “We may be at the peak of the need for knowledge workers,” said Atif Rafiq, a former chief digital officer at McDonald’s and Volvo. “We just need fewer people to do the same thing.””

WSJ: “Creative blocks aren’t exclusive to famous authors, or even to people we think of as being creative. We all get stuck.We make strides on a project—whether it’s mastering a sport, changing careers or building a company—and then, we just don’t…In “Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most,” [Adam Alter], the New York University marketing professor draws on research studies, anecdotes and interviews to reveal the self-imposed barriers that thwart our progress—and the actions we can take to surmount them. The first step, according to Mr. Alter, is to reframe our perception of failure. Bombarded by success stories, we often overlook the struggles and obstacles that came before them. The truth is that we all encounter roadblocks—Thomas Edison famously tried out more than 1,600 filament materials for his light bulb before finding the right one. We’re better served, Mr. Alter tells us, by recasting a barrier as “a feature rather than a bug on the path to success.””

NYTimes: ““Gentle parenting,” an approach that steers away from punishment and focuses instead on helping children become more self-aware, is the term that has caught on, but it’s sometimes used as a catchall for a set of emotionally-focused parenting styles. The prevailing ethos is that it’s important to acknowledge and understand a child’s feelings while maintaining boundaries, and that parents, in turn, benefit from recognizing their own feelings. “It’s a generation that takes learning and self-growth seriously,” said Becky Kennedy, 40, a clinical psychologist known as Dr. Becky to her nearly two million Instagram followers, and who Time magazine called the “millennial parenting whisperer.”…“Things like feelings not being soft, feelings being the core of who you are — there’s more acceptance of that,” she said. “I think it’s a generation that feels like, I have one life. I want to understand myself. I want to feel good.””

Atanu Dey: “The world is a complex place and we cannot hope to understand it without a good deal of effort. We cannot rely on just looking at the world superficially. We have to examine the evidence and reach our own conclusions. We have to be careful not to simply swallow whatever is presented to us uncritically. We should learn how to think. That’s hard. It is easier to just go along with what people tell us. They are telling us what to think, and what to believe. They want power over us to lead us to their preferred destination. We have to learn how to think and not be told what to think.”

Alexandra Samuel: “Whether you write a newsletter, post a lot or a little on social media, or just need occasional ideas for reports, finding something to write about is often the hardest part of the job. All too often, I think of something to write that I’m sure I won’t forget…only to forget it. That’s why it’s essential to set up a system for capturing all the different ideas you have, or even to capture little phrases or comments you might want to use in a future report, article or presentation.  I used to keep all these random ideas in a tiny paper notebook, but flipping through page after page of scrawled writing made it hard for me to find the right idea when I needed it. So about 15 years ago, I committed to putting all my random ideas into a digital notebook instead…I have found that the more religiously you capture your ideas, the more the ideas will come!”

WSJ: “AI will continue the current process of automating parts of workers’ jobs. But while today’s automation is often described as applying to dull, dirty and dangerous tasks such as moving parts in a factory or warehouse, generative AI brings a new dynamic: Primarily, it supports knowledge work by providing the ability to create first drafts of documents, emails, presentations, images, video, product designs, etc. So, knowledge workers might spend more time editing than creating, particularly as generative AI is embedded into all the software products they use today. For instance, instead of an email system just typing ahead a few words, it could draft several paragraphs. Customer-relationship-management software could suggest topics to discuss with a sales prospect and even a script to follow. And a salesperson could describe a presentation in natural language, and draft slides could be created, accessing corporate data and images to fill out details.”

Andy Kessler: “Success is 1% inspiration and 99% preparation. Ideas are shooting around faster than ever, but most are worthless because no one does the hard work to implement them. Implementation requires hours and hours not of sweat—we’re in a service economy now—but of preparation. You must do it all: reading, researching, falling into one rabbit hole after another on the internet to find the right series of precedents and test cases and quotes to make your point, pitching your idea coherently and succinctly so it doesn’t sound pie-in-the-sky but practical…Study everything, not only the task you’ve been assigned. Dig deep. Come up with ideas and potential solutions. Work on an elevator pitch for what excites you. Don’t wing it. Prepare. And trust me, the feeling you get from preparation-induced success is better than anything you can buy at a dispensary. Preparation will make you super great.”

Randall Holcombe: “Prices offer buyers and sellers information about the value of goods and services, and to maximize that value, prices should change in proportion to the cost of producing those goods and services. If productivity increases by 2% a year, then prices should fall by 2% a year to reflect the lower cost of obtaining those goods and services. With inflation, prices lose some of their informational content because to see the true cost of something requires adjusting its price by the rate of inflation. Because individual prices tend to change intermittently, this calculation becomes more difficult as inflation rises. If the price of something is up 5% this month, is that a real price increase, or is that price just catching up with inflation? By this logic, the target rate of inflation should be negative.”

Luca Rossi: “After surveying 2000+ companies between 2013 and 2017, Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim proved that what separates elite engineering teams from average and poor ones, is mostly how fast and often they ship…Shipping fast and often is really what you should optimize for, and this alone over time lifts you at a whole another level from those who don’t.”

Anurag Wadehra: “There are only two ways to attract customers.  One, to have them want your product. Two, to have them need your product…The first way is based on evoking desire among customers. The second way is based on persuading customers. Most businesses use both ways to attract customers.  Even if used together, each way is different in how it affects a customer. So, each way represents a different type of attraction game.  An attraction game includes all tactics that pull customers through their journey, over time: from branding, promotion, sales to training, renewal and support. Let’s call these two types of attraction games: Desire Games and Persuasion Games.  Desire games evoke desire for what’s missing in your customers’ lives without your product. Persuasion games persuade them of what’s possible in their lives with your product.”

Economist: “Now a new wave of digitisation, driven by the arrival of smartphones and the internet, is changing payments systems again. By making possible near-instant, remote payment, it massively reduces friction in the movement of money. This both facilitates trade from a distance and leaves a clear auditable trail. Digitised forms of payment can also become a basis for the provision of broader financial services, an especially important change in poorer countries with less developed financial systems…This report will describe the differing payment models, contrasting the bank/card networks in the rich world with the fast payments systems in emerging markets and the closed fintech ones in China. It will assess the possible role of cryptocurrencies and central-bank digital money. And it will look at how some governments may seek to use digital finance to reduce their dependence on the West. A good place to start is where the most exciting action is: the emerging world.”

Ashu Garg: “Generative AI, specifically, will likely have the biggest impact on the way that enterprises develop NLP systems. Indeed, for businesses that already rely on NLP, integrating LLMs is a natural next step. Industries with text-centric use cases, including document processing, sentiment analysis, and chatbots, will be among LLMs’ earliest adopters. On the other hand, in cases where products do not inherently involve language or NLP, we’ll see more experimentation, as companies explore how LLMs can improve user experiences and layer on language as a more intuitive interface to their products.”

Business Standard reports on a speech by India’s Minister of External Affairs: “In that speech, the minister sent some important messages about the government’s thinking on several critical issues. The first message was that the government will support manufacturing. Second, the government will continue to pursue its protectionist policies.  Third, the government will help create a domestic value chain. Fourth, the government seeks to energise the economy and motivate the businesses to believe that it is possible to manufacture in the country through the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme. Fifth, strong business is not only about economics, but also a critical segment of national security. Sixth, it is important for India to move to a strategic economy, have a clear sense who are our partners, where are our opportunities, where should we focus on our technology tie-ups. Seventh, Make in India is a strategic statement and not just an economic or manufacturing programme. Eighth, the focus on services is actually an elegant excuse for being incompetent in manufacturing. Finally, business or economics is too serious to be left to the businessmen and economists. In other words, the government knows best.”

WSJ: “After years of shunning bricks-and-mortar in favor of e-commerce, even companies that started online have been signing leases. Helping drive the move, retailers said, is the fact that rising digital-advertising costs are making it more difficult and expensive to attract new customers online. Warby Parker’s executives, for example, said that when the company opens a physical location in a new market, online sales in the area roughly triple. Long term, they believe they could operate at least 900 U.S. stores…“That’s a massive advantage of starting online,” said Co-CEO and Co-Founder Dave Gilboa. “We know where all of our customers are ordering home try-ons or they’re making their purchases.””

Shane Parrish: “The single biggest thing that separates people is the consistent ability to show up and do the work. The consequences of failing to show up consistently are getting the results you deserve but not the ones you want.”

FT: “The new Kings of Wall Street are not the Wall Street banks, big or small. That title belongs, rightly, to the Blackstones and the Apollos of the world. These groups — growing rapidly, lightly regulated, nimble and diversified — are where the really big money on Wall Street can still be made.”

Brookings: “The primary determinant of our long-term prosperity and welfare is the rate of productivity growth: the amount of output created per hour worked. This holds even though changes in productivity are not immediately felt by everyone and, in the short run, workers’ perceptions of the economy are dominated by the business cycle. From World War II until the early 1970s, labor productivity grew at over 3% a year, more than doubling over the period, ushering in an era of prosperity for most Americans. In the early 1970s productivity growth slowed dramatically, rebounding in the 1990s, only to slow again since the early 2000s…Large language models and other forms of generative AI are still at an early stage, making it difficult to predict with great confidence the exact productivity effects they will have. Yet as we have argued, we expect that generative AI will have tremendous positive productivity effects, both by increasing the level of productivity and accelerating future productivity growth.”

Business Standard: “More than 70 per cent of Indian youth aged between 15 and 29 cannot send emails with files attached. Nearly 60 per cent cannot copy and move a file or folder. Over 80 per cent cannot transfer files between a computer and other devices. And only 8.6 per cent can create electronic presentations with presentation software (including text, images, sound, video or charts). These numbers can be found in the Multiple Indicator Survey for 2020-21, published by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) [recently]. The survey defined nine parameters for assessing the information and communication technology (ICT) skills of Indians between the age of 15 and 29.”

Oscar Munoz: “The central metaphor is in the book title, Turnaround Time, which refers to the concept of turn time: when we run an airline, how quickly an aircraft turns from finishing one flight to the next one. That is the genesis. It is a double entendre on words there. Fundamentally, the takeaway is twofold. The concept of coming into a corporation with the need to turn it around and deliver value, the first instinct is to do a smart, strategic overview and all the tactical things that go around that. The book really focuses on the fact that you have to get a united organization with not only a viable and coherent [strategy] but also a compelling [one] that everybody is part of. So the theme that people will get out of it is my concept of “listen, learn, and only then can you lead.””

Brian Chesky: “There’s almost no social networks left. I would argue that social network companies have pivoted to social media. Social networking became social media when your friends became your followers, and when your friends became your followers it wasn’t about connecting. It was about performing. And then, suddenly, that wasn’t real connection. Instagram is moving more and more to an algorithmic feed. A lot of the things you see in your feed aren’t even people you follow. TikTok is not even who you follow. It’s like some global algorithm. And so you don’t even often know the people you’re following, and you’re not having an intimate connection to them. Fewer young people are even on Facebook so, more and more, these online networks are not gateways to the physical world.”

Inside the Big World of Small Objects: “For over 40 years, Tom Bishop’s dollhouse miniatures show has been the gold standard for serious collectors and hobbyists alike.” Some beautiful photos in the story.