Rajesh Jain

38 Smart Questions to Ask in a Job Interview: via HBR. Among them: “What are your expectations for me in this role? What’s the most important thing I should accomplish in the first 90 days? What metrics or goals will my performance be evaluated against?” Also see:10 Common Job Interview Questions and How to Answer Them.

WSJ: “People are embracing and documenting their delulu online—as well as the catchphrase “delulu is the solulu”—as a way to challenge themselves and make risky career moves that they hope will pay off. Some see it as another form of manifesting, another way to affirm that whatever dreams they have will eventually come true.”

Mint: “The pick-up in construction [in India] started in the last quarter of 2021, gained some momentum in 2022, and further pace in 2023. What led to this spurt? An ongoing residential real estate boom. As companies started asking employees to head back to the office after allowing work from home during the pandemic years, the demand for homes in cities shot through the roof. On the other hand, transport infrastructure projects have picked up pace, too. “This year, the maximum construction activity in infrastructure is in railways and highways/roads. About 40% of the Union budget for infrastructure ( ₹10 trillion) was allocated towards these sectors. Projects that were going slow till 2022 have picked up significantly. There is also huge construction on the Smart Cities Mission front,” said Kushal Kumar Singh, partner at Deloitte India, a consultancy. In some ways, the current boom in India is similar to the rapid growth the Chinese construction market saw in the 2010s.”

Raghuram Rajan: “Our sense is we are fast going the old China way. We are trying to emphasise infrastructure build-out — which itself is a source of big growth. But in this case, it is largely government infrastructure, because the private sector is much slower to build out infrastructure. And then bring in low-skilled manufacturing with the hope that it will move up to higher skilled manufacturing, so that eventually we will become a workshop to the world, just like the east Asian countries did before us. The problem with this vision is that the world has sort of moved on. It is no longer open to another China coming up and flooding its market with manufactured goods. China is already there and not going anywhere. It has a lot of still low-skilled labour in its western provinces and it’s bringing them into action. Yes, it had a little bit of a kerfuffle with the US, but they’ve realised that they can’t afford that and are trying to repair bridges. But China also has the benefit of having fantastic universities and is trying to focus on the other end — intellectual property and intellectual capital. We also have competition like Vietnam. So this notion that the old, export-led growth in manufacturing is going to be available to us just like it was available to everybody else fails to recognise the current reality. In that process, we are also giving up our greatest strength — we are a society which is open, democratic, where debate is possible, and where you can challenge the received wisdom. At least that used to be the case. As we move towards the China model and become more authoritarian, we are giving up our great strengths which are going to be very valuable for the 21st century as we build out the ideas industries — brain-based industries rather than brawn-based industries.”

Arnold Kling: “My experience with creating an app to grade and provide constructive feedback on op-ed essays has been eye-opening. Before there were large language models, it would have taken me months of working all day to train a computer to do anything close to what I taught ChatGPT to do in a few hours. The ability of the LLM to understand and be understood without the user having to write computer code is a superpower. Because you can use ordinary language with ChatGPT, and because you can correct your instructions using ordinary language, you can create all sorts of apps without having to write and debug computer code. You just tell it what you want, and then go back and forth with it until it gets the app working the way you would like. It is like having a human software developer you can talk to who turns your instructions into code almost instantly. Imagine what will happen when these AIs are connected to physical tools. These physical tools might be custom robots or all-purpose robots. You could be a farmer who never has to go into the fields—just explain to the robots what you want. Or you could be a chef who gives directions without being in the kitchen. Or a scientist who conducts experiments without having to spend all day in the lab.”

Shankkar Aiyar: “The promise of change is located in the potential of a young population — ten of India’s states have a median age below 27. The need to unlock demographic dividend is not just an aspiration. It is now a compulsion. The need for employment tops every opinion poll and survey conducted by platforms in the past few years. India annually adds around 8 million persons to the job market. For sure India is the fastest growing large economy but it must grow at a higher rate for it to deliver growth across the political economy…States need to capitalise on emerging opportunities for shifting the workforce from low income farms to high productivity sectors. Success demands states reform labour laws, enable land acquisition and unclog regulatory cholesterol…There is a misplaced belief that the power of propelling the virtuous cycle of growth rests on the Union Government. The promise of India’s potential is located in the domain of states and awaits awakening and deliverance.”

FT: “Amy Edmondson has won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award for Right Kind of Wrong, about how to learn from failure and take better risks. Her book won over the judges with its systematic, richly illustrated exploration of how to build on “intelligent failure” and its critique of the craze for failure that often hypnotises entrepreneurs and innovators…The book illustrates its point with important cases, from early heart transplants to the Boeing 737 Max crashes. Schroders’ chief executive, Peter Harrison, another judge, said it provided “clarity and practical prescription to address the issues businesses face every day”.” More: “Asked to recommend parts of her book that busy executives could focus on, she singles out the chapter describing what constitutes an intelligent failure, and a second section “about the importance of . . . being perpetually aware of the fact that you’re missing something”. Of two “fundamental human states”, she explains, “the more common one is [the state] of knowing, of face-saving, of wanting to win, not lose. The more productive, useful one is . . . wanting to learn, wanting to fully understand the broader situation, other people’s views, and come to the best possible hypothesis or decision.””

WSJ: “When P&G acquired Gillette [in 2005], the razor company had roughly $10 billion in sales and largely sold to men. At the time P&G’s products, such as Tide and Pampers, were mostly marketed to women. Warren Buffett, one of Gillette’s longtime and largest investors, called it a “dream deal.” For years the combination paid handsomely and boosted P&G’s profits as Gillette rolled out more sophisticated designs and higher-priced blades. That strategy was disrupted by online brands like Dollar Shave Club, which was acquired for $1 billion by Unilever in 2016, as well as a shift by some men to grow beards and shave less frequently.  Gillette responded in part by reversing its strategy, introducing lower-cost blades and its own subscription delivery plan. Then CEO David Taylor said in 2017 that the risk with focusing on the premium market “is you can still grow, but you have a smaller group of users who are willing to pay ever higher prices for better performance.” In the latest fiscal year, sales in P&G’s grooming segment fell about 3% to $6.42 billion while profits slipped 2% to $1.46 billion.”

Reid Hoffmann: “The founder vs market question is very interesting. I’d posit that it’s rarely such a stark choice. It’s much more often about the right founder for the right market or for the right moment in time. Satya Nadella (a “re-founder,” as I christened in my podcast Masters of Scale) is a generational CEO at Microsoft, could he have this same transformative impact at, say, McDonalds? Or a small 5-person start-up in the fashion business? Maybe. Maybe not. Fit matters. Similarly, when you look at founders, there are distinct stages from 0 to 1, and then 1 to scale. The founder who can get you from 0 to 1 might not be the right one to scale an organization. As you know, I was the CEO at LinkedIn from 0 to 1, but ultimately, Jeff Weiner was the “re-founder CEO” that led our team to truly global scale. In those early days of 0 to 1, there often seemed to be a fifteen-minute gap between believing that “we were going to rule the world” and then feeling as if “we’re so gonna die.” That’s just one of the different challenges and experiences from building to a global scale!”

TIME Person of the Year 2023 is Taylor Swift. “Swift’s accomplishments as an artist—culturally, critically, and commercially—are so legion that to recount them seems almost beside the point. As a pop star, she sits in rarefied company, alongside Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna; as a songwriter, she has been compared to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Joni Mitchell. As a businesswoman, she has built an empire worth, by some estimates, over $1 billion. And as a celebrity—who by dint of being a woman is scrutinized for everything from whom she dates to what she wears—she has long commanded constant attention and knows how to use it. (“I don’t give Taylor advice about being famous,” Stevie Nicks tells me. “She doesn’t need it.”) But this year, something shifted. To discuss her movements felt like discussing politics or the weather—a language spoken so widely it needed no context. She became the main character of the world.”

Economist on Constellation Software: “Whether by fluke or design, Constellation’s dealmaking success is based on principles that look strikingly similar to those of the world’s heavyweight acquirer, Berkshire Hathaway. Like Warren Buffett, Berkshire’s boss, and his right-hand man, Charlie Munger, the founder and president of Constellation, Mark Leonard, seeks out businesses with a lasting competitive edge. In Constellation’s universe, such a “moat” is enjoyed by software firms that specialise in building digital wares for unsexy industries from car dealerships and builders to spas. Tech giants shun these relatively piddling markets and smaller rivals lack the requisite know-how. The result is rich profits for the incumbents. After a deal is done Constellation, much like Berkshire, runs the business with benevolent neglect. It does not integrate newly acquired companies or parachute in fresh managers. It is content to leave day-to-day operations to the existing leadership. It does not desperately try to squeeze out inefficiencies by centralising common business functions. Constellation believes that splitting a business weakens its bond with customers, notes Paul Treiber of RBC. Cash from the subsidiaries flows to the parent company, which uses it to buy new businesses. These in turn generate more cash, and so on.”

WSJ: “Forty years of research on how people reason about novel possibilities reveals that the glorification of children’s imagination is misguided. Children are no more imaginative than adults. Quite often, they are less imaginative. That is because, while children have the capacity to contemplate hypothetical ideas and counterfactual events, they do not have the knowledge or expertise to use that capacity as effectively as adults. There is room for innovation in everything we do—cooking, cleaning, writing, drawing, navigating, negotiating—but such changes require sustained effort and reflection. We have to acquire the right knowledge and cultivate the right habits of mind. Imagination, like any other faculty, has to be developed and refined through years of practice. Every time we entertain a thought that transcends what we are currently perceiving, we are using imagination. Thinking of mermaids requires imagination, but so does thinking of past vacations, distant friends or future meetings. Almost all mental life requires traveling beyond the here and now to contemplate what was, what will be, what might be, what should be, and what could have been. Life is a series of problems—what to eat? where to go? who to ask?—and solving those problems requires entertaining multiple possibilities and then selecting the best option among them.”

Donald Boudreaux: “If you want lasting change in society – if you want to shift the Overton Window – your only hope lies in your preferred philosophy becoming ascendant. Ideas must change. And for ideas to change the way people talk (and write, and report, and blog, and tweet) must change. So, too, must there be change in the ways teachers teach. Unfortunately, there is no simple recipe for changing ideas in your preferred direction. Nor is there any guarantee that even the most-promising efforts to change ideas in your preferred direction will work. But these realities are no excuse to sit on the sidelines. If you are (as I hope) a liberal, support the production, polishing, and promoting of liberal ideas. There are many different ways to do so. In your personal engagements, do not be afraid to take the liberal position. Also, find those persons and organization that you believe offer the best hope of not only defending, but also of furthering, liberal ideas. Support these persons and organizations.”

Human Progress about Norberg’s book “The Capitalist Manifesto”: “Step back and examine the trendlines. A third of all wealth ever created was created over these last two decades alone. Over the last 20 years, during every minute of complaining about how global capitalism has wrecked the world, over 90 people climbed out of destitution. Child mortality has fallen so dramatically that the number of annual child deaths is down by millions compared to a decade ago even as the total population has grown. The greatest progress occurred in the countries that most integrated into the global economy. Why is that? The miraculous problem-solving capacity of human beings that allows us to improve our conditions—if given the freedom to do so. Hence countries in the economically freest quartile enjoy more than twice the average per capita income of less free countries.”

The Generalist: “Hummingbird Ventures has built an astonishing track record – all while staying out of the limelight. Its secret to success? A meticulous approach to identifying outlier founders…Throughout his career as a venture capitalist, Barend Van den Brande has likely heard upward of 10,000 pitches. Ten thousand times, a founder has sat before him and told a story. They have spoken of their background. They have narrated the problem before them. And they have unfurled their solution. It is the job of a venture capitalist to listen to such stories – and to poke at them. To find the holes yet to be darned and stick a finger through the fabric. To find the story beneath the one being told, hiding. To hear what is being said and what is not.”

Economist: “In the rich world, workers now face a golden age. As societies age, labour is becoming scarcer and better rewarded, especially manual work that is hard to replace with technology. Governments are spending big and running economies hot, supporting demands for higher wages, and are likely to continue to do so. Artificial intelligence (ai) is giving workers, particularly less skilled ones, a productivity boost, which could lead to higher wages, too. Some of these trends will reinforce the others: where labour is scarce, for instance, the use of tech is more likely to increase pay. The result will be a transformation in how labour markets work.”

John Gray: “When something comes along which contradicts my expectations, I’m pleasantly surprised. I get pleasant surprises. Whereas, if you are an adamant optimist, you must be in torment every time you turn the news on because the same old follies, the same old crimes, the same old atrocities, the same old hatreds just repeat themselves over and over again. I’m not surprised by that at all. That’s like the weather. It’s like living in a science fiction environment in which it rains nearly all of the time, but from time to time it stops and there’s beautiful sunlight. If you think that basically there is beautiful sunlight all the time, but you’re just living in a small patch of it, most of your life will be spent in frustration. If you think the other way around, as I do, your life will be peppered, speckled with moments in which what you expect doesn’t happen, but something better happens.”

Philip Howard: “The ability to do things in our own ways activates the values for which America is well-known: self-reliance, pragmatism, and loyalty to the greater good—what Alexis de Tocqueville called “self-interest, rightly understood.” For most of American history, the power and imperative to own your actions and solutions—the concept of individual responsibility—was implicit in the idea of freedom. Americans didn’t abandon our belief in individual responsibility. It was taken away from us by post 1960s legal framework that, with the best of intentions, made people squirm through the eye of a legal needle before taking responsibility. Individual responsibility to a broader group, for example, was dislodged by a new concept of individual rights focused on what’s best for one person or constituency. The can-do culture became the can’t do culture. At every level of responsibility, Americans have lost the authority to do what they think is sensible. The teacher in the classroom, the principal in a school, the nurse in the hospital, the official in Washington, the parent on the field trip, the head of the local charity or church . . . all have their hands tied by real or feared legal constraints.” [via Tyler Cowen]

Don Boudreaux: “It’s long past time that economists (and other social scientists) quit not only assuming that that which is possible to be achieved only by creatures with superhuman knowledge supplies relevant benchmarks for assessing real-world outcomes, but also to quit treating such outcomes as being theoretically achievable. They’re not achievable, not even in theory. When theory is properly done, such outcomes are prohibited. No one would dare say, “In theory it’s possible to reengineer porcine genes so that pigs will fly.” Yet just as silly is an economist saying, “In theory, government officials can impose tariffs and dispense subsidies in a manner that will result in economic outcomes superior to those achieved by free markets.” Or, at any rate, such a statement by an economist will remain silly until someone offers a theoretically compelling reason to believe that government officials can gain access to all the detailed knowledge that is routinely used by the millions of individuals in markets.”

WSJ: “Billions of dollars worth of goods are regularly transported in corrugated cardboard boxes, so it’s no surprise that there are many scientific papers on the material’s strength—equations, computational modeling and detailed consideration of humidity, temperature, paper type and box shape. They are the sorts of structural calculations you would do to design a building. It’s like paper architecture. Corrugated cardboard is made of a wavy internal layer that’s sandwiched between two flat layers. The outer layers are important because they make it harder to bend—to curve that structure, you’ve got to stretch the outer layer, and as the experiment with the weight demonstrates, that’s very hard to do. The farther apart those layers are, the harder it is to make it curve, so the first job of the corrugations is to hold the sides apart and stop them from sliding over each other. But the most interesting bit is the corrugations themselves. They’re made of a flat surface that has been bent back and forth repeatedly as it moves laterally. It’s a useful and fundamental rule for anything that starts as a flat sheet: It may be easy to bend it in one direction, but you can’t also bend it in the other direction at the same time without stretching or squashing it.”

Madanmohan Rao recommends my book as one of 2023’s top 10 for Entrepreneurs: “Not all startups need external funding from investors – they can grow from customer revenues alone, as explained by Rajesh Jain, who has been an entrepreneur for over three decades. Hard-earned lessons from his ventures IndiaWorld and Netcore are shared in a storytelling format. He defines a ‘proficorn’ as a private, bootstrapped, profitable, and valuable venture (worth $100 million). The 16 chapters cover his experiences learned in ideation, team building, revenue generation, managing growth, creating a flywheel, and learning from failure.”

FT: “There are no better guides to how the country might best leverage its potential — and manage the obstacles — than Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and Rohit Lamba, an economist at Pennsylvania State University. In Breaking the Mould: Reimagining India’s Economic Future, they expertly devise a new growth model for India, offering detailed recommendations for reforming the country’s industrial strategy, healthcare, education and democracy. Their arguments are bolstered by several illuminating case studies — from online MBA classes in which students use virtual reality headsets, to a sari outlet combining manufacturing and services — that highlight the nation’s entrepreneurial zeal. They suggest India should not attempt to follow other countries by walking the low-skilled manufacturing path to economic development, since many nations are now competitive in building and processing. Instead, they say that India should leverage its expertise in direct services exports, from IT to education, as well as services embedded within the manufacturing sector. Importantly, the authors argue that India must also work to bolster its democracy — after all, the ability to think and speak critically is a cornerstone of innovation.”

Avishai Abrahami: “A lot of the time, I talk to entrepreneurs, and most of the time, younger entrepreneurs, they talk to me about the fact that they make a lot of decisions every day. And I usually say, “Well, I make probably four every quarter.” And I think the number one thing is to understand that it’s much better to make four every quarter than a dozen every day because I mostly try to delegate and to make sure that we know: What are the rules? How do we measure success? How do we enable other people to make smart decisions? And they’ll come and tell me what they want to do, but essentially, it’ll be mostly their decisions and not mine. It’ll be my responsibility but their decisions. We have a full method of how to make decisions. Everything is measured. This is number one. We are fanatic about it. We measure everything. If you did something that cannot be measured, then nothing happened. That’s our philosophy. In fact, a lot of the time, don’t tell us about it. Don’t come and show off a project that cannot be measured. You can come, by the way, and show us a project that you measured and had a negative effect, and you’re going to get the same amount of cheers as you would for a project that had positive effects because we want to encourage that aggressiveness in testing and going to new places.”

George Will: “Many of today’s anticipatory anxieties about artificial intelligence might be well-founded, but not its threat to cause enormous joblessness. Until the middle of the last century, many women were telephone operators. Displaced by mechanical switching technology, they moved on to other jobs. Pethokoukis says ATMs led to increased bank teller jobs as it became cheaper to open bank branches. He imagines finding ways to employ the energy around and beneath us. The Earth’s molten core is about as hot as the sun’s surface (11,000 degrees Fahrenheit), and will generate heat for billions of years as radioactive elements decay. “The continuous energy flow is roughly thirty terawatts” — trillions of watts — “almost double all current human energy consumption.” And: “There are no theoretical obstacles to placing tech in low-Earth orbit that would convert some of the 173,000 terawatts of solar energy continuously striking Earth, an amount ten thousand times annual global energy consumption.” Vitality that translates into economic growth can be transformative. “The difference between an economy growing at 2 percent for the next fifty years and growing at 4 percent over that span is,” Pethokoukis notes, “massive — a $60 trillion economy in 2076 versus $160 trillion.” A prudent society does not assume that such things are achievable. However, a dynamic society does not allow anxieties about the future to constrict is horizons, or to seek security in the embrace of the state.”

WaPo: “Conceived in 2016 by Carlos Moreno, the 15-minute city imagines putting “humans and their well-being as the main purpose of urban organization,” Moreno, an urbanist and professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris, told The Washington Post in March. The idea is “to promote sustainability and health by reducing car dependency and increasing physical activity,” primarily through walking, biking and mass transit. This decentralized urban planning model has become a rallying cry for politicians and urban activists around the world fed up with exclusive single-use zoning, car-centric development and homes segregated from work, retail shopping and other amenities. Yet the discussion about 15-minute cities obscures a central tension at the heart of the idea: How can all of us live within 15 minutes of all amenities and jobs in cities housing millions of people?”