Rajesh Jain

WSJ: “Getting AI to work in the real world could boost the range of our electric vehicles, improve care for cancer patients, and take on jobs that were previously done solely by humans. But creating systems that do this is tricky because it requires knowledge about both a specific field, and machine learning. The results are worth it, say those adopting this approach. Starting with what we know about the world is what scientists and engineers do, after all. There are a handful of names for this approach, including “physics-informed neural networks” and “scientific machine learning,” but they all have one thing in common: They give AI someplace to start. That starting point is what we already know about a system, be it a bridge or a battery, from decades or even centuries of hard-earned knowledge. This framework helps limit the universe of solutions an AI has to experiment with before it can make useful predictions.”

Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar: “Globalization has helped India prosper. But since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) assumed power in 2014, India has started diluting or reversing some aspects of globalization, moving toward a more nationalist approach…India still has deep‐​seated problems in education, employment, and the environment. The unfinished agenda is long.”

McKinsey: “Realizing the full potential of marketing, however, is not as simple as the CEO looking over at the CMO and saying “go.” The big challenge is building the right dynamic between CEOs and CMOs. We’ve written before about how CMOs can better deliver growth. Yet we still found an opportunity for CEOs to engage more deeply with their CMOs and other growth leaders to more effectively work together to unlock growth. By developing a clearly defined C-level growth role that has marketing at its center, building conviction in modern marketing methodologies, and measuring what matters, CEOs can reinvigorate their relationships with marketers.”

Bloomberg: “Since its creation in 2008, the IPL has married American-style marketing with the glitz of Bollywood and the energy of India’s vast population, turning a sport that was long a financial laggard into a corporate juggernaut. Despite a season that runs for just eight weeks each spring, bidders recently paid a total of $6.2 billion for the right to broadcast IPL games through 2027. That works out at $15.1 million per match, more than soccer’s English Premier League and just behind the $17 million networks pay for each game in the National Football League in the US.”

FT: “If you’ve ever wondered how to get ahead at work, Michelle King, a consultant and leadership coach who advises companies on diversity and inclusion, claims to know the answer. In her latest book, How Work Works, King looks at trends changing the workforce, including artificial intelligence, hybrid working and inclusive hiring practices. The secret to advancing yourself in the office, King argues, is to learn “how to read the air”. It’s a different way of phrasing the more common concept of reading the room which she says amounts to using your social and emotional skills to navigate “a minefield of informal systems, like informal networks, information sharing, development opportunities, and advancement”. King’s advice is to make the implicit explicit. She recommends mapping out informal networks, listing people within that network and identifying those who can give you advice on a vexatious issue or career move. And then expanding the network or spending time with contacts. All of this sounds sensible, if exhausting.”

WSJ on app stores for cars: “Writing software apps for cars is nowhere near as easy as writing software apps for phones, although companies like GM are hoping to remove obstacles…While it is impossible to predict what developers will imagine, apps of the future could use a vehicle’s GPS and passenger video screen to render real-time guides to constellations of stars that are viewable through the moonroof, or use vehicle location to proactively recommend changing thermostat settings at home, GM said. Other uses could include in-vehicle gaming on passenger screens or weather apps that integrate with navigation and GPS to warn drivers that they may soon encounter hazardous road conditions.”

NYTimes: “Success, Dr. [Adam] Grant argues, is about growth over time more than it’s about notching victories. And one of the best ways to build skills is to challenge yourself, he says. “The feeling that something is uncomfortable is a signal that you’re about to learn something new,” Dr. Grant said in an interview. “That’s a signal we should not only pay attention to, but amplify.” You may have heard that people learn better when lessons are tailored to their “learning style.” Some people might be visual, aural or verbal learners, and so on. But Dr. Grant presents research suggesting that people don’t always learn more when information is tailored to their preferences. The opposite may even be true: We might grow more when we deliberately step outside our comfort zone.”

Latecomer: Dr. Stephen Hsu on genetic technology: “In the long run, we could improve humanity. People in the future could on average be smarter, much longer lived, nicer, more cooperative, lower rates of mental illness. I think this will be within our grasp technologically in the near future. I don’t know if society will organize itself to achieve these things. Having worked in this field for 10 or 12 years, I think it’s been established in published papers that we can predict complex traits through DNA. We built a company which can genotype embryos and select embryos based on this information, so I have no doubt what I just described is a possible future outcome that humanity could achieve. Whether it will get there, I don’t know.”

FT: “Oligarchs are an eternal type that is now proliferating worldwide, west as well as east. Many of them run countries. Yet oligarchs are strangely understudied, says David Lingelbach, who with Valentina Rodríguez Guerra has written a new book, The Oligarchs’ Grip, which reworks Aristotle’s definition. An oligarch, say the authors, is “someone who secures and reproduces wealth or power, then transforms one into the other”. So: what makes an oligarch — especially today? First, oligarchs are not simply tycoons. The latter are rich business people who may not have any political power. Lingelbach told me that Elon Musk went from tycoon to oligarch when he bought Twitter last year…Today, adds Lingelbach, “Musk is one of the five or 10 most consequential oligarchs in our world.””

WSJ: “Like the Bard’s Mark Antony and Henry V, real-life politicians rely on rhetoric and stagecraft to achieve their goals…Most of us dislike performative politics, and for good reason. Congressmen and Senators take votes that they know will prove meaningless to the outcome of legislation, give fiery speeches to empty chambers, and rant at befuddled witnesses who have no opportunity to answer their questions because none are really posed. It is theater, in a thoroughly negative sense of the term. If one wants to learn, for example, how politicians who are intelligent and upright but dull and theatrically clueless can get beaten by a talented demagogue, study the famous scene in “Julius Caesar” that takes place by the slain dictator’s corpse and before a large, unruly crowd.”

Rita McGrath and M. Muneer: “More than 80% of Indian startups don’t make it past the first 5 years and even fewer the next five. As part of a few startups that survived these two milestones, we can tell you how important it is to constantly look at your business models and make corrections while staying lean all the time. Some business models are inherently more attractive than others. Yet, oddly, stakeholders often don’t ask the obvious questions. This may be because it is perceived as either complicated or too much work. For those looking for a quick overview of what makes one model superior to another, here are some key questions…Are we able to create switching costs once we have customers?…Are we transactional or relational?…How interchangeable is our user interface?…Painkillers or vitamins?…Do we have a chance to take advantage of network effects?…Do we solve a problem once and for all, or is it recurring?”

Ron Shaich: “The most powerful responsibility of leadership in business or in any organization is to actually transform—once you discover what’s going to matter in the future. The key to most everything is, first, tell yourself the truth, where you really stand, what the competitive marketplace is. Second, based on that, know what matters. Third, get done what matters…It is important to recognize the nature of innovation in any enterprise. If you don’t innovate, you die. You must continue to stay ahead or at least keep pace with a changing marketplace. As your company gets larger, it takes more time to develop that and to get it done. Most organizations are set up with functional leaders. Functional leaders are very good at saying “no” in defending their function. The problem is, very few people say “yes.” Saying “yes” is about a fundamental commitment to where the enterprise itself is heading, not to the functions.”

Manoj Pant: “At the base of the problem is the reality that no economy can outpace the growth of its consumer base, as production and demand must match. While digital economy aggregators have been multiplying the production of services rapidly, all of them together can only sell a particular product (be it education, food, cars, etc) to the same set of individuals. As many fight for the eyeballs of the same consumer, only one will succeed (so ‘winner takes all’ is still plausible), and the rest will fail. Another symptom of the problem is the downsizing of many companies in the IT sector. The bottom-line is clear. While the size of the manufacturing sector is actually limited by the fixed costs of setting up industrial units, which keeps the number of contenders low, in the case of technology-driven aggregators, the very source of growth (low delivery costs) can also be the cause of their downfall. Maybe Freddie Bulsara, the star performer of the rock-band Queen, was prophetic. As we go along, many more digital companies are likely to bite the dust.”

Economist: “In some ways the covid-19 pandemic was a blip. After soaring in 2020, unemployment across the rich world quickly dropped to pre-pandemic lows. Rich countries reattained their pre-covid gdp levels in short order. And yet, more than two years after lockdowns were lifted, at least one change appears to be enduring: consumer habits across the rich world have shifted decisively, and perhaps permanently. Welcome to the age of the hermit…Three years on the share of spending devoted to services remains below its pre-covid level. Relative to its pre-covid trend, the decline is even sharper. Rich-world consumers are spending on the order of $600bn a year less on services than you might have expected in 2019. In particular, people are less interested in spending on leisure activities that generally take place outside the home, including hospitality and recreation. The money saved is being redirected to goods, ranging from durables such as chairs and fridges, to things like clothes, food and wine.”

The Generalist: “Zavain Dar believes we’re entering a fecund era for life sciences investing. The software and AI revolution fundamentally alters the composition of businesses founded in the sector, allowing for more capital-efficient approaches and leading to higher multiples…Zavain expects the ascent and proliferation of large language models (LLMs) to open new frontiers in biology and chemistry. In particular, advanced LLMs and other foundation models should lead to greater accuracy, finer fidelity, and emergent abilities in these fields. The result could be an explosion of new, promising treatments and therapeutics.”

WSJ: “It helps to understand how these AIs work. Two terms it’s imperative to know: “generative AI” and “foundation models.” The current generation of AIs that have people so excited—the ones doing things that until a couple of years ago it seemed only humans could—are what are known as generative AIs. They are based on foundation models, which are gigantic systems trained on enormous corpuses of data—in many cases, terabytes of information representing everything readily available on the internet. Generative AIs are the AIs that generate eerily humanlike responses to written prompts, or surprisingly convincing images, or artificial voices that sound just like the humans they copy…Between the invention of the steam engine and the debut of the locomotive, more than a century elapsed. Meanwhile, a new science was born, which in turn became the midwife of countless other advancements essential to the Industrial Revolution. If the development of generative AIs conforms to this pattern at all, its near future will include transformative inventions—AIs expert in different subjects, truly personal assistants—followed by years of refinement, mad scrambles to harness and benefit from these new technologies, and possibly another sort of Industrial Revolution. But rather than a revolution predicated on energy and matter, this one will be based on the manipulation of data and insight.”

Rainer Zitelmann: “Massive public borrowing and economic interventions by governments and central banks are exacerbating current problems by pushing them into the future. This will continue until the system either recovers through radical capitalist reforms – or collapses, giving rise to demagogues whose promises of salvation mobilize the masses and lead them into bondage.” [via CafeHayek]

Satya Nadella: “look at this new example of the inverted classroom, where people are saying, “Look, we know you’re going to use one of the LLMs, like Bing Chat or ChatGPT, for your assignments. What we want to know are the prompts. We’ll give you the answer, now tell us the prompts.” That’s critical thinking. Because you learn so much more. I think that critical thinking, good judgment, how to think in a broad way, and not being afraid to learn, could be the new benefits. I sometimes say to myself, “My God, I wish I understood more biology.” And now I can ask dumb questions and have things explained at my pace. Our ability to consume more knowledge and to grow our own knowledge base can improve. I think there’ll be lots of interesting implications from having this powerful tool.”

Rama Bijapurkar: “The truth is that consumer demand in India is not fragile anymore. It is substantial and robust, and has demonstrated the powerful arithmetic of consistent compounding growth. Yes, it is vulnerable because of Consumer India’s occupation profile, but it is now large enough to not collapse. Even when there is a slowdown in growth rate, it has enough momentum to move forward because of its large mass (momentum in physics is mass times velocity). All of Consumer India is desperate to consume everything from quality-of-life improvers to productivity tools to affordable indulgences. Poor consumer sentiment has never significantly impaired consumption. Even borrowing to consume has been morally purified. The only impediment is limited income, which is improving by the year. It is now the supply side that ails and lags. It needs to find/rediscover its animal spirits to serve existing demand and stoke demand growth.”

Mint: “Urban reforms must begin by letting Indian cities look after themselves better through far more meaningful public representation, backed by access to financial resources. Municipal bodies need greater leeway on levies for them to raise money at reasonable rates from bond markets. The private use of public zones by the well-off—think of cars parked on streets and gated enclosures of public roads—should be neither free nor lightly charged. With tech trackers available, road pricing could also be experimented with as a revenue source. So long as civic charges are progressive, with the rich paying much more, cities could find new ways to fund themselves. As our economy emerges and we hope to attract the world’s gaze as a beacon of success in this ‘Asian century,’ we need cities and towns that are worthy of being identified as among the world’s best. Things like leaky sewage pipes and bad air quality must not let us down—especially not if we aim to host mega events like the Olympics. Our urban spaces need to spiff up.”

Skimming, scanning, scrolling — the age of deep reading is over (FT). “Digital reading appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Stunning numbers of people with years of schooling are effectively illiterate. Admittedly, nostalgics have been whining about new media since 1492, but today’s whines have an evidential basis. To quote this month’s Ljubljana Reading Manifesto, signed by publishers’ and library associations, scholars, PEN International and others: “The digital realm may foster more reading than ever in history, but it also offers many temptations to read in a superficial and scattered manner — or even not to read at all. This increasingly endangers higher-level reading.” That’s ominous, because “higher-level reading” has been essential to civilisation. It enabled the Enlightenment, democracy and an international rise in empathy for people who aren’t like us. How will we cope without it?”

WSJ: ““The Cult of Creativity” comes at a technological turning point. The emergence of generative-AI tools has given us the option of outsourcing our brainstorming, becoming prompt engineers to idea-spitting machines. Will this new development erode our sense of agency in the workplace once again? If large-language models are capable of creative acts, what will be our uniquely human contributions? In Mr. Franklin’s idealistic scenario of the future, we will redirect our energy away from producing more disruptive innovations and toward a thoughtful consideration of “what should be produced in the first place.” World-saving ideas and technologies are still needed—whether they result from creative thinking or not—but “the space to question the goodness of the new,” Mr. Franklin suggests, might be “the big idea we need right now.””

Economist: “Research by Oriana Bandiera of the London School of Economics and her co-authors looked at the diaries of 1,114 CEOs in six countries, and categorised their behaviours into two types. On their definitions, “leaders” have more meetings with other C-suite executives, and more interactions with multiple people inside and outside the company. “Managers” spend more time with employees involved in operational activities and have more one-to-one meetings. Leaders communicate and co-ordinate; managers drill downwards and focus on individuals. The research suggested that firms that are run by leaders perform better than those run by managers.” More: “As firms in knowledge industries automate routine tasks and rely on the same digital tools—Amazon Web Services, Gmail, Microsoft office software—it is better management, not investments in technology, that can give them a competitive edge. Poor management can blunt it, by killing productivity and raising staff turnover. According to a Gallup survey from 2015, half of Americans who left a previous job did so because of a bad manager. Last year McKinsey, a consultancy, found that a similar share of job-leavers said they did not feel valued by their managers. The value of good management, then, is rising. At the same time, the environment in which managers do their job is being transformed. This new landscape rewards some skills more and some less than in the past. As a result, your manager tomorrow will not look the same as your parents’ did.”

WaPo: “Before they became products in their own right, Marvel movies were unusually expensive and elaborate advertisements for action figures. Ike Perlmutter, erstwhile CEO of Marvel Entertainment, developed the company into a film studio not with the aim of making good or even endurable movies, but with the goal of enticing fans to buy merchandise. More than 30 films and 20 spinoff series later, his gambit has paid off and then some. Marvel has sold a lot of toys, but it has also sold more tickets than any other franchise in history, as journalists Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards document in their scrupulous new book, “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios.” When the trio completed the manuscript last April, “Marvel had made thirty-one feature films with a worldwide gross of over $28 billion.” (An additional movie has since been released; the company is nothing if not diligent about pumping out content.) The Marvel movies are now “the most successful film series of all time,” a fount of cinematic sugar expertly optimized for bingeing.”

Vinod Khosla: “I think the biggest problem is that AI will cause great abundance, great GDP growth, great productivity growth, everything economists love—and increase income disparity. The good news is, if [AI allows us to] change GDP growth, say, for the next 50 years, from 2% to 4%, there’s more than enough abundance to share. There’s room for universal basic income, assuring minimum standards, and people will be able to work on the things they want to work on. The need to work in society will disappear within 25 years for those countries that adapt these technologies.”