Rajesh Jain

NYTimes: “When I wake up during the night, I try every mental trick to avoid thinking about my job. Because if my thoughts wander to anything work-related, I will ruminate — about deadlines, unfinished tasks, the laugh-free joke I made during a meeting — and I’ll be awake for hours. This is a familiar scenario for Guy Winch, the author of “Emotional First Aid” and a co-host of the “Dear Therapists” podcast. He has found, in his psychology practice, that people experience most of their work-related stress while they’re off the clock: during a commute, with family or friends, or in the middle of the night…There’s evidence that ruminating about work during leisure time can affect our emotional well-being, but thinking about creative solutions to problems does not. So when you’re stewing, Dr. Winch said, ask yourself: “Is there something I can do about this situation? And if so, what?” Frame specific concerns as problems to be solved, he said. Are you brooding that a new hire is performing better than you? Ask yourself what that person is doing well, and what he or she is not doing that you are, Dr. Winch said. “And most importantly,” he added, “what you might learn from them.””

WSJ: “The way humans reproduce recorded sound could change more in the next decade than it has in the past century. What’s coming are solid-state speakers, etched from wafers of ultrapure silicon—like microchips. That means they operate like nothing available today—and also that they have capabilities that no existing sound-reproduction system can match. This technology also embodies a broader trend—the conversion of all electronic components to solid-state silicon—that is easy to take for granted, but has had profound consequences for how we interact with the world. The technology that has made this transition possible, called MEMS—short for micro-electromechanical systems—is the reason an entire 1990s RadioShack’s worth of gear can be crammed into the slim slabs of touch-sensitive glass that now fit in our pockets.”

NYTimes: “if you’re new to meditating, it can be hard to know where to start. So start small — with five minutes of breathing exercises to calm and focus the mind every morning. Not only will it “set the tone for the day,” said Dr. Eva Tsuda, a meditation instructor at the UMass Memorial Health Center for Mindfulness, but meditating earlier may make the practice easier to stick to. In a recent study of almost 900,000 meditation app users, those who meditated in the morning were more likely to maintain the habit.”

Scott Galloway: “The business strategy that marked 2023 is not leveraging AI or adopting hybrid work, but focusing on bloat. Specifically how to reduce it. Whether you’re a critic or a stan, Elon’s 80% reduction in the bird’s workforce is the most impactful business decision of the year. The Zuck may have coined the phrase “the year of efficiency,” but it was Elon who inspired the movement…A new generation of business leaders discovered that a firm with a 20% operating margin can see as big an increase in value by cutting costs $1 billion as it can by increasing revenue by $5 billion…Elon didn’t fire 6,000 employees at Twitter, he (effectively) terminated over 300,000 workers across tech. Because every other tech CEO felt they could have the great taste of reduced expenses while avoiding the calories of collapsing revenue.”

Michael Munger: “There are two fundamental truths of macroeconomics, and while we can sometimes work around them, they are surprisingly resilient and robust. First, inflation, at least in the sense of a sustained increase in the overall price level over long time periods, is caused by artificial and unwise increases in the money supply. Second, increases in the overall price level are often misread by entrepreneurs and business people as increases in the actual demand for their specific products. That’s not surprising when you think about it. The price for the widgets you make is going up fast, and you want to expand your factory and hire more workers. But you have trouble doing that, because the blodget makers, and the whatsit makers are all trying to do the same thing. Austrian economists call this the problem of “correlate errors,” where market participants are fooled by inflation into thinking that there is a “real” increase in the demand for their specific product…unless inflation is controlled on a long-term basis, it is workers who will suffer most, as the consequences of the artificial stimulus hurt real economic growth.”

Economist: “A world in which India and China set their territorial dispute aside, as they did previously for over three decades, following an accommodation to that end in 1988, could be very different from the one many American strategists envisage. India is already much less likely to provide support to American forces in the event of a conflict with China over Taiwan than many in Washington seem to imagine. A sustained India-China thaw would make that unimaginable. In such a world, India would also be even less of a friend to the West on thorny global issues such as climate change, trade and debt than it is currently. A continued India-China detente would be in both countries’ interests. India’s momentary effort to reduce its economic dependence on China underlined how hard that would be. Two of Mr Modi’s biggest priorities, infrastructure and manufacturing, are especially reliant on Chinese inputs. India’s pharmaceutical industry, a big exporter, gets 70% of its active ingredients from China. And even if the prime minister could bear to curb such supplies (of which there is little sign) India’s influential business lobbies would try hard to dissuade him. The brief hiatus also illustrated their strength of feeling and traction on the issue. This does not allay India’s security concerns over China. They are long-standing and India will in any event continue to build up its defences because of them. India sees rapid economic growth as the essential condition for the build-up, among much else. And it rightly sees business with China as a necessary means to help it achieve that growth.”

WSJ: “The world’s population has increased eightfold since 1800, and standards of living have never been higher. Despite increases in consumption, and contrary to the prophecies of generations of Malthusians, the world hasn’t run out of a single metal or mineral. In fact, resources have generally grown cheaper relative to income over the past two centuries. Even on the largest cosmic scale, resources may well be limitless…Long before humans have extracted all the useful atoms in the Earth’s crust and oceans, we will develop the technological sophistication to obtain vastly more atoms and energy from asteroids, planets and beyond. In that future, just as has always been the case, the only bottleneck will be the rate at which new knowledge can be created. And nothing prevents us from improving that rate too. Knowledge is the ultimate resource and there are no limits on creating it.” More from Johan Norberg: “History shows that we don’t have to be satisfied with the economic and intellectual limits of the age in which we live.” And George Will: “Economic growth has not just coincided with, it has been caused by, population growth — more brains, more trade in knowledge. There are, however, those who consider people a plague, and who favor ever-larger regulatory government to prevent ruinous human ingenuity and planet-threatening dynamism. Such people resent the time-price metric of economic (and hence social) progress because it measures the results of millions of unplanned and uncoordinated decisions, cooperations, inventions and refinements. The metric frustrates those who believe, and who benefit from, pessimistic predictions that the supposedly retrograde present is a harbinger of a stagnant future of scarcities — unless government plans a better future. The time-price metric blows to smithereens the idea that progressivism is conducive to progress.” FT: “Energy generation, health and working life could all transform for the better this decade.”

Reuters: “Q: How does the world’s biggest pizza brand respond to high inflation in the world’s most populous nation? A: With the world’s cheapest Domino’s pizza. The 49-rupee ($0.60) pizza in India, Domino’s No.1 market outside America, is the tip of the spear in its fight against rampant inflation that’s squeezing profits and pricing out many customers, according to the CEO of its franchisee there. The company wants to “own that price point”, said Sameer Khetarpal, confirming the stripped down, seven-inch cheese pizza with a “sprinkle” of basil and parsley is Domino’s cheapest anywhere. “You are coming to the store or open the app, because there is a 49-rupee callout,” he said, adding that Domino’s global team supported the plans. “Customers are going to eat out less because prices are higher everywhere – our existing consumers should not go out to some competition.” In Shanghai, by comparison, Domino’s cheapest savoury pizza is priced about $3.80, and in San Francisco about $12, online menu prices show.”

WaPo: “There is, however, no reason that the theory of the novel should be a strictly academic affair. Almost all of us read novels, after all, and it’s worth thinking about what we’re up to when we do. Joseph Epstein, longtime former editor of the American Scholar magazine and longer-time literary culture gadfly, has attempted just that in his slim but ambitious new book, “The Novel, Who Needs It?”: It is, or at least initially seems to be, a theory of the novel for the rest of us. In that regard, it is an admirable effort. Unfortunately, it is not one that Epstein himself seems prepared to put into practice. “Reading superior novels,” Epstein writes, “arouses the mind in a way that nothing else quite does.” Echoing some other prominent theorists on the subject, he seems to hold that this is an effect of the novel’s polyphonic qualities, its ability to let various voices jangle against one another. “More than any other literary form, the novel is best able to accommodate the messiness of detail that life presents,” he argues. “The novel, for those who love it, is the literary form of forms.” Above all else, for Epstein this means that novels are good at getting us to experience other minds, mostly through our encounters with their characters: “What the novel does better than any other form is allow its readers to investigate the inner, or secret, life of its characters.” This capacity makes them powerful tools for human improvement, he says, expanding “one’s appetite for the richness of human experience.” It is the novel, he concludes, that guarantees our access to a “more complex view of life, its mystery, its meaning, its point.””

Deirdre McCloskey: “What are the virtues of capitalism? Trying things out. The only way to get new things, such as we have to an astonishing degree since the liberal revolutions of the 19th century is to let ordinary people “have a go” (as the English say), is through trying out commercially tested betterment. If an electric car in 1900 is a failure in the market, the age of internal combustion engines comes. If it succeeds in 2000, the age of electric cars comes. The government is ill-equipped to choose such winners. The other virtue is massive altruism. A novelty does not survive a commercial test unless it is profitable. Being profitable means that the entrepreneur has found something that masses of people find desirable, such as central heating in cold countries or cheap air conditioning in hot. Being unprofitable means that you are harming people on balance, wasting resources to make things they do not want. Markets are the most altruistic system we have. Governments, by contrast, are systems of coercion, by definition producing what people do not want, worsened by corruption impossible in mutually advantageous exchange.” [via CafeHayek]

Ben Thompson: “The broader issue is that the video industry finally seems to be facing what happened to the print and music industry before them: the Internet comes bearing gifts like infinite capacity and free distribution, but those gifts are a poisoned chalice for industries predicated on scarcity. When anyone could publish text, most text-based businesses went from massive profitability to terminal decline; when anyone could distribute music the music industry could only be saved by tech companies like Spotify helping them sell convenience in place of plastic discs. For the video industry the first step to survival must be to retreat to what they are good at — producing content that isn’t available anywhere else — and getting away from what they are not, i.e. running undifferentiated streaming services with massive direct costs and even larger opportunity ones. Talent, meanwhile, has to realize that they and the studios are not divided by this new paradigm, but jointly threatened: the Internet is bad news for content producers with outsized costs, and long-term sustainability will be that much harder to achieve if the focus is on increasing them.”

Martin Wolf: “Where is India now and where might it go, economically and politically?…Let us assume that India’s GDP per head continues to grow at 5 per cent a year, while that of the US grows at 1.4 per cent, roughly as it has over the last three decades. Then, by 2050, India’s GDP per head (at purchasing power) would reach about 30 per cent of US levels, roughly where China’s is today. According to UN median forecasts, India’s population would also be 4.4 times as big as that of the US. So, its economy would be some 30 per cent larger than the US’s. It is, in sum, quite reasonable to assume that India will become a great power. It is not that hard to imagine that its economy will be of a similar size to that of the US by 2050. Thus, western leaders are making a sensible bet on an alliance of convenience with India.”

FT: “Artificial intelligence companies are exploring a new avenue to obtain the massive amounts of data needed to develop powerful generative models: creating the information from scratch. Microsoft, OpenAI and Cohere are among the groups testing the use of so-called synthetic data — computer-generated information to train their AI systems known as large language models (LLMs) — as they reach the limits of human-made data that can further improve the cutting-edge technology…Generic data from the web is no longer good enough to push the performance of AI models, according to developers. “If you could get all the data that you needed off the web, that would be fantastic,” said Aidan Gomez, chief executive of $2bn LLM start-up Cohere. “In reality, the web is so noisy and messy that it’s not really representative of the data that you want. The web just doesn’t do everything we need.”…The new trend of using synthetic data sidesteps this costly requirement. Instead, companies can use AI models to produce text, code or more complex information related to healthcare or financial fraud. This synthetic data is then used to train advanced LLMs to become ever more capable.” Jayant Sinha: “Amidst challenges, India can thrive with transformative opportunities in AI, innovative batteries, nuclear fusion, and manufacturing growth, paving the way for sustainable prosperity.”

Management Tools & Trends: Bain’s regular survey. [via Rita McGrath]

Gena Gorlin: “As a builder, you approach your life as the ultimate project you are in charge of shaping and overseeing (i.e., building), by your own efforts and according to your own chosen vision and values, with yourself as its ultimate owner and beneficiary. If you wanted to assess the extent to which you’ve been in a builder’s mindset in the past week, you might ask yourself: how much of it have I spent choosing to do things based on how I thought they would serve and advance my life?”

Arnold Kling: “Neoclassical economists said that your wage as a worker will be set equal to the marginal revenue of what you produce. If an additional hour of your work enables the firm to produce 10 more widgets, and widgets sell for $2 each, then your wage will come to $20 an hour. In the twenty-first century, marginalism does not apply to pricing or to wage-setting. To understand the contemporary economy, we have to think in terms of overhead. Real-world business is often dominated by overhead. Overhead, or fixed cost, is all of the cost that a firm incurs even if it sells no output. You need to pay for tax compliance. You need a business license. You have advertising and marketing expenses. You need to develop and refine your product. You need IT infrastructure. As you get bigger, you need middle managers, a human resource department, finance and accounting, a legal department, janitorial staff, security guards, and on and on…Marginalism is an interesting theoretical construct, worth learning. And there may be some situations in which it provides a decent approximation for research purposes. But the real world of business is increasingly dominated by overhead. Economists should more fully embrace The Overhead Revolution.”

Brian Chesky: “I always believe that the best loyalty program is people loving your product and if they love your products, they come back.”  More from WSJ on loyalty programs: “Loyalty programs with tiers or earning mechanisms can provide companies with considerable increases in sales and gross profits, according to a 2019 study in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science that Voorhees co-wrote. The key, he says, is the feeling customers get from reaching a level of loyalty status. “It’s not so much about earning them the first time, but once you have them, you don’t want to lose them,” he says.”

FT: “Moullakis and Wright’s book The Millionaires’ Factory, told in anecdotal style and based on a healthy level of access to older generations of Macquarie bankers, charts its rise from a handful of Harvard Business School graduates working on advisory mandates in Sydney to become the pioneer of infrastructure as a separate asset class for long-term investors, and today, one of the world’s biggest financial traders in commodities. So why did Macquarie prosper when many others did not? The authors show Macquarie’s culture was far more important than any particular business deal, strategy or innovation, with several of its peculiarities going back to the bank’s early days. The philosophy of David Clarke and Mark Johnson, who built Hill Samuel Australia in the 1970s, “was to give employees as much latitude as possible, while remaining consistent with safety and controls”. Throughout Macquarie’s history there has been little top-down strategy or capital allocation. Instead, the company empowers entrepreneurial individuals to evolve new business lines, from 24-hour foreign exchange dealing in Sydney, to gold bullion arbitrage with London, cash management trusts, cross-border leasing and later ideas in infrastructure and commodities.”