Category: Thinks

The Science of Strong Business Writing: from HBR. “Strong writing skills are essential for anyone in business. You need them to effectively communicate with colleagues, employees, and bosses and to sell any ideas, products, or services you’re offering.”

Adam Grant: “You’re entitled to your own opinion if you keep your opinion to yourself. If you decide to say it out loud, then I think you have a responsibility to be open to changing your mind in the face of better logic or stronger data. I think if you’re willing to voice an opinion, you should also be willing to change that opinion.” [via Farnam Street]

Don’t dismiss market bubbles — some leave lasting progress behind: by Ruchir Sharma. “For every few dozen flops, there can be companies that provide long-term innovation.”

Santosh Desai: “What makes this yearning for the normal more poignant is that the pandemic does not seem to have a sense of ending about it. It seems to abate only to return unpredictably, with sudden ferocity. We alternate between periods of hope and of despair, and all the while the need for things to become normal becomes that much stronger. Today normal is not boring, it is what we dream about.”

People, the Ultimate Resource: by Atanu Dey. “One of the many contrarian ideas I have is that there are no “natural” resources and that all resources are creations of the human mind. As economist and professor of business administration Julian Simon (1932 – 1998) argued that “the most important of all resources is human beings.” (The Ultimate Resource 2. Page 581). The more humans, he insisted, means more abundance and less scarcity.”

Why Do So Many Strategies Fail?: from HBR. “All too often those failures occur because the CEOs’ approach to strategy isn’t holistic. At many innovative new businesses, CEOs excel at identifying ways to generate value by addressing unmet customer needs—yet don’t adequately analyze what it would take to capture a sufficient portion of that value. Or they get seduced by the initial success of their new business models, grow too fast, broaden their firms’ scope too far, and neglect to invest in capabilities needed to sustain a long-term competitive advantage.”

The next act for messenger RNA could be bigger than covid vaccines: from Technology Review. “New messenger RNA vaccines to fight the coronavirus are based on a technology that could transform medicine. Next up: sickle cell and HIV.”

Henry Hazlitt: “And unlike a government agency, the private owner is obliged by self-preservation to try to avoid losses, which means that he is forced to run his railroad economically and efficiently. And also unlike a government agency, the private capitalist is nearly always obliged to face competition – which means to make the services he provides or the goods he sells superior or at least equal to those provided by his competitors. Therefore the private capitalist normally serves the public far better than the government could if it took over his property.” [via CafeHayek]

10 global trends in news publishing that are worth a think: Suprio Guha Thakurta. ” Subscriptions have moved to the top of the agenda for 2021 for publishers. However, the interesting thing to note is it is not an either/or situation. Publishers believe that there is a need to create multiple revenue streams including subscriptions, display advertising, native advertising, events, and commerce. Even when one looks at reader revenues, subscriptions is one pillar, affiliate revenues and marketplaces are seeing traction.”

How to be a wealthy nation: by Manish Sabharwal.”Covid reminds us that national strength needs massive, non-farm, formal job creation.”

Deirdre McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi: “But the economy is not a car or boat: there is no helm, there is no wheel to steer it. Benevolent people at the “helm” are not enough to take a better direction, though bad or ignorant people messing with it can take it in a disastrous direction. The economy is more complex than anything a single set of benevolent human beings can steer, if we want to keep the economy rich and the society free. And non-benevolent people, of which sadly there is no shortage at any price, are very willing to use emergencies to seize riches and to crush liberty.” [via CafeHayek]

How Qualtrics beat SurveyMonkey: “Qualtrics should’ve lost but somehow emerged victorious. By wielding a 3 pronged strategy of utilizing cheap Utah labor, gutsy product marketing, and aggressive GTM tactics, the company resoundingly beat Surveymonkey. Their story acts as a warning to operators, the things that are popular among Twitter thought leaders are just the flavor of the moment, build the business you want and ignore everyone else. There is a reason almost all software companies are built on the back of outbound sales motions. It works. ” [from Every]. From HBR: The Founder of Qualtrics on Reinventing an Already Successful Business

The Great Gatsby Curve: Will India be like East Asia or Latin America?: by TN Ninan. “If India combines great inequality with poor inter-generation mobility, it risks becoming, not like East Asia with its rapid growth rates, but like under-performing Latin America.”

Thomas Sowell: “A government bureaucracy, which can dispense its goods or services below cost – including at zero price, in some cases – can always demonstrate a large “need” for its output, and therefore a “justification” for a large staff and budget.” [via CafeHayek]

Sherlock Holmes: “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” [via David Perell]

Inside India’s podcast boom: from Hindustan Times. “There are thousands of new podcasts, and millions more are listening. Audio entertainment has seen a surge in the pandemic.” More. And even more from Financial Express.

NYTimes on becoming an outdoor scientist. “Don’t worry: No final exams, or hefty student loans are involved. All you need are a few simple items, and an abiding interest in the wonders of nature…Make your own crystal, Measure a Tree, Make a Constellation Map.”

Atanu Dey: “Poverty is the default state of humanity. People in every part of the world, ever since the birth of species some 250,000 years ago, have lived lives of grinding, unrelenting poverty. It was relatively very recently, just a few centuries at most, that some people became free, and they escaped poverty. Gradually freedom and prosperity spread around the world. Now only those countries that lack freedom are still locked into poverty. India is not prosperous because Indians are not free. Why are they not free? Because they don’t struggle to be free. Why don’t they struggle for freedom? Because they think that they are free. If they understood that they are prisoners, they would struggle, they would gain freedom, and thus escape poverty.”

Marc Andreessen: “What does the Internet do? I think it’s clear the Internet is both an engine and a camera. To some extent it does drive behavior, but it also shows us ourselves in vivid detail. That is bound to make us uncomfortable, but is also very useful. The Internet can reinforce existing beliefs and misconceptions, but it also reveals underlying truths that otherwise would remain hidden. For example, the Internet makes it far easier to discover when an authority figure is lying to us, which is an overwhelming good. As with any technological change, it’s important to consider who is the most threatened by it…..who freaks out the most. The Internet can be thought of as a cream that you rub on undeserving gatekeepers to drive them insane. I think it has all the right enemies.”

FA Hayek: “The preservation of a free system is so difficult because it requires a constant rejection of measures which appear to be required to secure particular results, on no stronger grounds than that they conflict with a general rule, and frequently without our knowing what will be the costs of not observing the rule in the particular instance. A successful defence of freedom must therefore be dogmatic and make no concessions to expediency, even where it is not possible to show that, beside the known beneficial effects, some particular harmful result would also follow from its infringement. Freedom will prevail only if it is accepted as a general principle whose application to particular instances requires no justification.” [via CafeHayek]

David Perell: “”What can this person teach me” is a much more productive question than “How is this person wrong?””

Tyler Cowen speaks to David Deutsch on Multiple Worlds and Our Place in Them: “When you make an economic decision, you’re used to the fact that something you buy — some goods — have a different value in different universes — that is, at different times. Even to the same you. You might be slightly different, but even if you aren’t very different, the value to you of something might be very different today from tomorrow. For example, oxygen, if you’ve got COVID, would be differently valuable. Most things change their value gradually over time. You change yourself gradually over time. It’s exactly the same in different universes. In different universes, you value different things. In some universes, you’re so different that it’s not worth calling you you anymore. Just like over time it might not be.”

Benedict Evans on ecommerce: “Instead of looking at the product category and the buying journey, look at the logistics model. Boxes, trucks and bikes.”

NYC mayoral contest will use ranked choice voting: “A candidate must get more than 50% support to win. If no one hits that threshold, the candidate with the fewest votes will be eliminated. The ousted candidate’s votes get redistributed to the voters’ second choices. That will continue until only two candidates remain.”

Howard Marks: “We’re in an asset bubble. It’s everything. It’s not particular to high-yield bonds, or to bonds, or stocks. It’s real estate, it’s private equity, it’s everything. The way I describe it is, we’re in a low return world . . . How do you make a decent return in a low return world? The answer is: it’s hard.”