Rajesh Jain

WSJ: “Companies are starting to train employees on how to give feedback to their peers and managers. They are pausing meetings to share real-time critiques. Increasingly, artificial intelligence could evaluate workers’ emails and videoconference meetings to give performance assessments. These leaders predict candid, real-time assessments could become more relevant. Such feedback could allow workers to lose the fear of retribution for speaking up about their peers’ work, and hear the good and the bad more often, in turn giving everybody the opportunity to make changes year-round and become more productive.”

Tim Harford: “Studies suggest an unnervingly plausible two-part engine of polarisation: first, given the choice, we seek out other people like us. Then, being surrounded by people like us makes us more extreme in our views and more confident that those views are correct. Our current information ecosystem offers us more choice than ever. Alongside social media we can pick and choose from websites, podcasts and YouTube channels to reflect any interest, geography and ideology. And how do we use that choice? Generally, by seeking out people who share our views, broadcasters who seem to “get” us and, often, by avoiding news altogether.”

WSJ: “As automated driving gets closer to reality, car designers and technology companies are giving more thought to what people might actually do in their cars when they no longer have to drive them—including how they may use them to work. Over the past few years, automakers like BMW have been rolling out what they call concept cars—prototypes of vehicles still in design stages that may or may not ever hit the road—with self-driving attributes such as no steering wheel and huge screens for watching videos and PowerPoints where the windshield used to be. “For us, the cars that will come out in 2030 are on the drawing board now,” Hampf says…Prototype designers are experimenting with interiors that break all the rules. Once a car no longer needs a human driver, the room inside can be designed as a lounge or an office with a desk. Cadillac’s splashy concept self-driving car called InnerSpace is a two-passenger luxury ride that sports a love seat in front of a massive video screen—all that’s missing is the popcorn.”

Vasant Dhar: “Now that the machine seems to understand what we say to it, it can create all kinds of things that we specify in natural language. It wouldn’t have been able to create things for us if it didn’t understand us. In a sense, text-to-video AI, however imperfect it might be at the moment, would have been difficult if not impossible without the ChatGPT capability. This new and improving ability of the machine to communicate fluently has far-reaching consequences on all aspects of our lives. It provides the AI with an unprecedented amount of high-quality training data about humans, that it acquires in parallel with its normal operation. So far, it has learned about the human world only indirectly, by analyzing the publicly available collection of human expression on the Internet. Now that the lines of communication are truly open, the machine has a huge amount of training data about our thoughts, desires and feelings to learn from. Such a machine can do all kinds of new things for us, like creating movies or legal documents and helping us live better lives. An individualized version of “Her,” as in the brilliant Sci-Fi movie, doesn’t seem that distant.”

Martin Gurri: “The will to liberty can overcome the will to power…Individual rights emerged during a centuries-long struggle against this kind of categorical tyranny: against the one-sided laws of aristocrats and bigots, against confusing power or wealth or even science with privilege, against the fiction that every human life is fated. We should expect today’s elites to fight back against threats to their rule—to pursue censorship schemes and claim ownership of “our democracy.” The struggle never ends. But an ideology of freedom makes sense only if it protects the claims of the individual over those of the group and the state and remains implacably hostile to the empire of labels and castes.”

Economist: “Throughout the 2010s the number of unicorns—private companies with valuations above $1bn—soared in America. Fully 344 of them were minted in 2021. Last year’s figure was 45. The end of the era of cheap money is largely to blame. In the go-go years, as investors raced to get a piece of the buzziest startups, tech firms had little need to tap public markets for capital. Crossover investors such as Tiger Global and Coatue, which operate in both public and private markets, flooded into Silicon Valley. Dharmesh Thakker of Battery Ventures, a VC firm, recalls that founders could “raise money on a Zoom call”. In 2021 crossover investors accounted for over half of startup funding. They have since retreated, last year contributing less than a third. Now investors are mulling how to sell their stakes in the unicorns of yesteryear. Most VC funds operate on a ten-year clock, backing startups in the first five and cashing out in the second. With over 700 unicorns, at a combined valuation of $2.4trn, a sizeable amount of money is at stake.”

FT: “The myth of the Great Writer creating in solitude is only sometimes true. People have long understood that most acts of creation are collaborative: pop music, sport, films, inventing the atomic bomb. Only for books, especially fiction, does the presumption of the lone genius hang on. That might have surprised Shakespeare, who co-wrote some of his plays and adapted many from other writers’ work. But at some point, literature grew snooty about collaboration. Writers who did do it, like the two cousins who co-wrote detective stories under the name Ellery Queen, often pretended there was a single author. The author Malcolm Gladwell told Vanity Fair: “Writers . . . have this false ethic of originality. Whereas musicians are like, ‘Yeah, totally — we took this little bit from that song. And it’s inspired by this.’ I love how open they are about the fact that creativity is a collective enterprise. I want writers to be able to talk that way.””

NYTimes: “The amount of electricity we consume for light globally is roughly the same today as it was in 2010. That’s partly because of population and economic growth in the developing world. But another big reason is there on the Las Vegas Strip: Instead of merely replacing our existing bulbs with LED alternatives, we have come up with ever more extravagant uses for these ever-cheaper lights, from immersive LED art installations and carpets that glow to basketball courts that can play video. As technology has advanced, we’ve only grown more wasteful. There’s an economic term for this: the Jevons Paradox, named for the 19th- century English economist William Stanley Jevons, who noticed that as steam engines became ever more efficient, Britain’s appetite for coal increased rather than decreased.”

Ben Thompson: “I don’t, for the record, think we are at an iPhone moment when it comes to virtual reality, by which I mean the moment where multiple technological innovations intersect in a perfect product. What is exciting, though, is that a lot of the pieces — unlike three years ago — are in sight. Sora might not be good enough, but it will get better; Groq might not be cheap enough or fast enough, but it, and whatever other competitors arise, will progress on both vectors. And Meta and Apple themselves have not, in my estimation, gotten the hardware quite right. You can, however, see a path from here to there on all fronts. The most important difference, of course, is that mobile phones existed before the iPhone: it was an easy lift to simply sell a better phone. The big question — one that we are only now coming in reach of answering — is if virtual reality will, for a meaningful number of people, be a better reality.”

Arnold Kling: “Let me start with the perspective of North, Wallis, and Weingast. They distinguish between a Limited-Access Order (L) and an Open-Access Order (O). Throughout history, most states have been of type L. The government resembles an organized crime syndicate that has suppressed all of its rivals. In order to do so, it probably had to negotiate an agreement among the most powerful gangs. Type L governments are free to take what they want from their subjects and use it for personal pleasure, to build monuments, to fund armies, and to promote development within their territory. As long as the general public feels a combination of comfort with their condition and fear of the force of government, the L will not face rebellion. As long as the agreement among the more powerful gangs holds up, L will be stable. Type O is a modern state, usually a democracy, in which pretty much every citizen accepts the legitimacy of the government. Although the benefits supplied by the government may be distributed unevenly, it does not operate like an L where a ruling coalition gets whatever it wants and everyone else has to accept whatever the ruling coalition gives it. The most fundamental difference between L and O concerns who is allowed to form a significant organization… The right to form an organization is what is meant by open access.”

Noah Smith: “Most physics students don’t go back and read Newton or Maxwell or Faraday or Kelvin, or even Einstein. But most philosophy students will read at least a few of the old classic thinkers, and often quite a lot. Why the difference? My view is that the difference comes from summarizability. Newton’s laws of motion can be fully and easily understood without reading Newton.” [via Arnold Kling]

Rahul Bajoria and Amruta Ghare: “We fundamentally agree that exports are what will drive India’s trade account surpluses. But ignoring the manufacturing sector, or not prioritising it, may not actually be a choice, given the dominance of goods in global exports. Global services exports account for only ~22% of total exports. So, the size of the pie to capture is smaller. And unless the services sector expands dramatically, the potential for India is for only incremental gains. India’s share of global services exports is currently ~4.4%, and the country is already the largest provider of telecom and information services. On the other hand, India’s share in the global goods export is ~1.9%, which shows a greater potential for growth. Increasing the country’s share here is even more critical if it is viewed as an opportunity to boost employment, particularly better-paying jobs in the manufacturing sector. The largest proportion of the labour force continues to be employed in agriculture (~45% of total) and construction (13%), where productivity is low. Consequently, wage growth is also subdued. Services, being relatively less labour-intensive, cannot fully absorb the excess labour in the economy. Hence, more manufacturing jobs need to be created for India to reap its demographic advantage…Increasing exports is necessary not just from the point of view of their contribution to growth, but also to maintain external stability. India does not need to choose between manufacturing and services. Given the country’s global leadership position in the export of services and the opportunity provided by the China+1 strategy, we argue that India has the capacity and means to succeed in both manufacturing and services.”

FT: “[Thermal batteries] use renewable energy to heat up blocks, rocks or molten salt. That heat is released on demand to power industrial processes. Using electricity to generate heat is nothing new. That is how toasters work. The difference is that these toasters are roughly the size of shipping containers and release steam as hot as 2,750 degrees Fahrenheit, more than a quarter of the sun’s surface temperature. The trick is keeping the batteries hot until the heat is needed.”

Raghu Raman: “The difference between successful and not-so-successful organizations eventually boils down to the degree of authenticity within them. This is the delta between what leaders profess and what the organization’s unsaid behavioural expectation is…One of the reasons that some organizations have a high degree of doublespeak is that they haven’t really made the transition from an industrial era of thinking, where the industry is at the centre and employees just man the machines, into the intellectual era, where the employee is at the centre of the value chain, with the machines supporting her.”

HBR: “Sustaining profitable growth requires a delicate balance between the pursuit of market opportunities (demand) and the creation of the capabilities and capacity needed to exploit those opportunities (supply). To proactively manage that balance, companies need a growth strategy that explicitly addresses three interrelated decisions: how fast to grow (the target rate of growth); where to seek new sources of demand (the direction of growth); and how to amass the financial, human, and organizational resources needed to grow (the method of growth). Each of those decisions involves trade-offs that must be considered in concert with a company’s overall business strategy, its capabilities and culture, and external market dynamics.” More: “Our research—which includes interviews and case studies—shows that a growth system has five components. Define a compelling customer outcome. Architect the right capabilities. Create the right operating model. Renew insights continuously. Measure return and reallocate investment.”

HBR: “The era of volatility requires that companies integrate capabilities for prediction, adaptability, and resilience in a manner uniquely tailored to their circumstances.”On prediction: “This capability involves generating beliefs about the future of your industry with enough precision and conviction to create opportunities for competitive advantage. For example, leaders may not know the full contours of the coming geopolitical landscape, but they’re sure to face a more fractured world of sharper rivalries, and that reality will shape parts of the macroeconomy. Companies must constantly work at developing scenarios, testing them against their risk and reward potential, and selecting a strategy that will adjust their exposures over time. The more asset-intensive a company is or the more fast-paced its competition, the more it will need good predictive capabilities. Private equity firms, for example, need superior prediction capabilities to generate detailed investment theses: A particular investment will produce a specific rate of return if and only if A, B, and C are all true. Most energy companies also require strong prediction capabilities, as do some leading telecom companies.”

Howard Friedman: “Generative AI [gen AI] and some of the incredible capabilities we’ve seen in the past few years are really mind-blowing. An important consideration that I advise for all business leaders is to think about the problem you are solving. Don’t get so excited about the latest and greatest tool. Instead, think about the issue you’re trying to address. What do you want to make a success of? Are you trying to look at a problem from a revenue or cost point of view? Approach it systematically. If it turns out that gen AI provides you a game-changing solution, great. Don’t start with the answer. Start with the problems first, then see what the answers are. Often, the best answers start with some basic analytics and then bring in advanced modeling or the latest tools that are out there.”

Andrew McAfee: “The reason why The Geek Way focuses on aspects of a company’s culture is because I came to believe that in industry after industry, it’s not the technology tool kit that separates really high-performing companies from the also-rans. It’s not like Silicon Valley has all the patents on AI and they’re not sharing them with the rest of the economy. It’s not like they’re the only ones who understand platform business models or the power of big data. Every management team I talk to understands that. Yet the companies that can succeed with exploiting the technology tool kit are pretty concentrated. They tend to come from one pretty small region in the country. They tend to center in a few industries, although that’s changing very rapidly. So my story about what is separating the companies that can harness all these amazing technologies from the also-rans is not a technology-based story. It’s a story based on the kinds of practices, the kinds of norms in place in a company that allow it to profit from whatever new technology comes along. One of my conclusions is that the technology tool kit is going to continue to expand and change and surprise us in the years going forward. Because the geeks have figured out how to build a company that can accept wave after wave of technology and harness it, the geeks are going to continue to pull ahead from the competition as the technology tool kit expands and becomes more powerful.”

WSJ: “The novelty of gamified training is a double-edged sword. While games may be a more engaging way to gain knowledge, some employees may perceive them as being too fun to focus on during working hours. After all, nobody wants their manager to think they are playing around when they are supposed to be focused on work. Therefore, it is important for leaders to set an example by logging onto these platforms themselves during work hours. In doing so, they make clear that playing on the job isn’t just tolerated by management but encouraged. By embracing gamified training, leaders can influence hesitant employees to do the same, while also enhancing their own knowledge. At KPMG, we found that the offices with the highest partner-participation rate in the training increased fees collected from clients by as much as 19% more than offices with lower partner-participation rates.”

Howard Baetjer: “In a world of endless possibilities but limited resources with which to try out these possibilities; in a world where many people have business ideas, but it’s not clear which of those ideas are good ones; in a world where no single person even knows how to make a pencil, much less predict what new products, processes, and technologies will best serve people’s needs a year or five years from now – in such a world, we need some means of sorting out the good ideas from the bad, for discovering which products and processes actually do serve us better than others. We need free markets because they give us such a means of discovery: profit and loss.” [via CafeHayek]