Fabricio Bloisi: “The only valuable thing in a business is its people and its culture — the way it innovates, communicates and adapts. What makes a company special is not what it can invest in or its products, but how it moves and adapts. It is very important that one has a very good team that can envision the future together, and they can make it happen and they can be in power and keep innovating. The biggest barrier will be to not have a strong team. That is my biggest objective.”
John Jumper on the big scientific problems he is most excited about tackling: “Really two things. I think one is simply that protein structure prediction will take us into drug development, be it small molecule or via protein design. This is just really, really exciting — that we will get qualitatively better at these problems in the next few years. The other one is really how AlphaFold can be used to inform how we understand more and more of the cell. And we’re seeing things like figuring out how proteins come together. We’re seeing larger and larger systems studied with AlphaFold and really creative uses. We’ll keep doing this, and it’ll get us out to really understanding the cell in a way that changes our science. That is really exciting to me.”
NYTimes: “Over decades of research, [Adam] Przeworski developed a theory that has become part of the bedrock of political science: that democracy is best understood as a game, one in which the players pursue power and resolve conflicts through elections rather than brute force. Democracies thrive when politicians believe they are better off playing by the rules of that game — even when they lose elections — because that’s the way to maximize their self-interest over time. To create those conditions, Przeworski found, it is crucial for the stakes of power to remain relatively low, so that people don’t fear electoral defeat so much that they seek other methods — such as coups — of reversing it. That means winners of elections need to act with restraint: They can’t “grab too much” and make life miserable for the losers, or foreclose the possibility that future elections would allow the losers to win. “When these conditions are satisfied,” Przeworski told me, “then democracy works.””
McKinsey: “Marketing leaders must deliver across four pillars of marketing excellence. They need to execute a clear marketing strategy with insight-led growth, produce best-in-class efficiency and effectiveness via marketing performance, and champion the latest and highest-impact tech-enabled marketing use cases, all while building a fit-for-purpose operating model. These pillars aren’t new, but success now requires that leaders build new capabilities that were once considered beyond the remit of the traditional marketing organization.”
NYTimes: “Many people naturally gravitate toward ambitious goals that are the traditional markers of success, like landing a dream job or winning an award. These kinds of targets can be highly motivating, said Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. But, she cautioned, whether you actually achieve them is usually at least partially out of your control. That’s not all bad. Outcome goals can get you off the blocks, she said. But if you miss your target, she said, falling short can be profoundly disappointing. Had I been singularly focused on running a certain time in Boston, for example, “Well, that may be your last marathon,” she said. Instead, she recommends focusing on the work you do to set yourself up for success.”