Rajesh Jain

WSJ: “Emily Oster, a Brown University professor and bestselling author, joined Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist and chief executive of Good Inside, in a panel discussion on how parents can raise resilient and independent children. They stressed intentional action and continuous engagement with the child from an early age.  “Parenting is a constant negotiation between connection and a kid feeling safe enough from your connection to be able to go explore,” Dr. Kennedy said. “Independence is born from the safety of dependence.”…The most important skill kids need is emotional regulation. “Kids are born with all the feelings in the world and none of the skills,” Dr. Kennedy said. “That’s a really big gap.””

Erik Torenberg: “The biggest contradiction in liberalism is between its main two values: liberty and equality. Liberalism’s goal is to achieve a utopia where all people have complete equality combined with wholly unfettered liberty. Of course, we often can’t have both full liberty and equality. If liberty is unlimited, we will have inequality. Because of course you will: People are different. They have different upbringings, different genes, different dispositions, and thus, different outcomes.” [via Arnold Kling] Arnold: “To effectively reduce inequality in income and education, we cannot simply add to liberty of people at the bottom. We would have to take away liberty from people at the top. That is the conundrum that we face today.”

““When someone is searching,” said Siddhartha, “then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal. You, oh venerable one, are perhaps indeed a searcher, because, striving for your goal, there are many things you don’t see, which are directly in front of your eyes.”” [via Atanu Dey, quoting from Siddhartha by Hesse]

Matt Johnson: “The BlackBerry was a technical device that solved an immediate problem, which is: how can we basically get data into the hands of consumers, and how can we have email mobile? And that’s a very small box, right? What Mike and Doug [Fregin] were trying to do, they’re trying to solve something extremely local, but the product itself…really had no vision. The product did not present a vision of culture and the future and how human beings would relate to one another in the way that the iPhone did. The iPhone is a product with incredible vision, and it’s saying that you are going to change the way that you live in order to make this product integrate with you. Whereas the BlackBerry was, “We’re going to give you this tool that is going to help you with the tiny problems that you have, and it’s going to be very, very useful.””

Arnold Kling: “Large, established businesses are sluggish for a reason. The middle managers who are coming to senior management with project ideas do not have much skin in the game. If the project fails, the cost will almost all be borne by top managers and shareholders. Senior managers have to be selective in choosing which projects to undertake. At some point, every project that requires effort from multiple departments is going to require active senior management support. At least one of the necessary departments will refuse to give the project priority unless senior management steps in. So a project can succeed only if it has senior management’s attention. But senior management support for a project is a scarce resource. You only have so much time and cognitive focus. In order to limit their commitments, senior managers will try to surface potential problems with a project as soon as possible. An initiative will be subjected to a careful process of evaluation, with all affected departments involved in studying and criticizing the project. This process has been characterized as “the culture of ‘no’.””

Niranjan Rajadhyaksha: “India has been unable to productively employ its young population, especially females. The result is that Indian economic growth in recent years has been largely powered by the more intensive use of capital as well as productivity growth. Many recent statistical studies have highlighted the same structure. One way to boost potential growth is to create the conditions for higher employment, something that India has been struggling with in recent decades, even though the claims of “jobless growth” may be exaggerated. Having the world’s largest population is an advantage only if there are enough jobs to convert a demographic fact into an economic opportunity.”

Shruti Gandhi: “A company’s vision statement should be focused on its long-term goals, purpose, and values, rather than just taking down a competitor. A good vision statement should communicate the company’s long-term aspirations, the problem it aims to solve, and the impact it wants to make….A vision statement for a startup is important for several reasons: 1. Provides direction and focus: A clear and compelling vision statement helps the startup define its long-term goals and direction, and provides focus to the team, helping them stay aligned and motivated. 2. Guides decision-making: A well-defined vision statement guides the startup’s decision-making process, helping the team make choices that are consistent with the company’s long-term goals and values. 3. Attracts customers and investors: A strong vision statement communicates the startup’s purpose and value proposition to potential customers and investors, helping the company attract the right partners and resources to achieve its goals.”

Evan Armstrong on the challenges media businesses face: “Consumers don’t want to pay you, Facebook is better at advertising, and unique distribution is necessary for long-term survival but almost impossible to get. If you somehow get an audience, congrats! Your reward is a million competitors who are constantly trying to kill you and steal your audience. Still, if you are able to climb up the power law, you may be able to build long-term success…For every single evolution of technology since the internet, content creation companies have been moved to the role of commodity supplier. As technology changes the types of popular supply, a media company is forced to alter its product or be left in the dust. To be a media company is to never be in control of your distribution and to be subject to the winds of progress on a daily basis.” Ben Thompson on the Unified Content Business Model: “Everything, in the end, is on its way to freemium. The right place to draw the line will and should differ based on whether a product is niche or scaled, and on the cost structure of the content producer; what seems less necessary, given the need to both leverage content costs and acquire customers effectively, is being religious about only making money in one specific way.”

Atanu Dey: “I desire water when I’m thirsty. But after a few glasses of water, I am done. I have no more desire for water. I may have other needs but water is not one of them. If every need I feel now is met without any struggles, then at least for now I am not bothered by them. I may have other needs that arise later that I cannot conceive of now but that’s something I have to deal with later. But for now, all I want is that I have sufficient amounts of stuff that meet my current needs so that I can be as free of needless unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) as possible. That is where humanity is headed. It’s going toward a world where everyone’s well-being is assured because they all have their consumption needs met regardless of how much wealth and income they have… In about 15 years or so, there will be equality in well-being. There will be inequality of wealth and income, and to some degree inequality in consumption, but there will be equality of well-being.”

Sebastian Park: “Decision-making is even more difficult than people realize. In the academic sphere, we talk about how we’re breaking out the decision: we assume no variance in the system, and then we say, ‘What’s one plus one?’ We say it’s two, and we’re all happy with that. That’s not how the world works! In the real world, everything operates with imperfect information. We don’t know what we don’t know. Additionally, things constantly change…All of this makes decision-making difficult. That’s even before we consider the effects of bias, the impact of noise, the fact that we don’t control our destiny, or the possibility that all our basic assumptions are wrong. The combination of these factors impedes our ability to make the perfect decision. Therefore, our goal is not to make the perfect decision. It’s to make the best decision possible at any given moment, based on what we know at that time, how we know it, and why we know it. It’s not a question of whether we regret a decision in retrospect; it’s a question of whether, knowing what we knew then, it was a good decision or a bad one.”

Mint on dealing with jet lag: “According to the Sleep Foundation, tart cherries or tart cherry juice contain melatonin and tryptophan if you’re not interested in taking a melatonin supplement. Tryptophan can encourage melatonin production. When flying west to east, Dr. Stacy Sims recommends ingesting 4 ounces of tart cherry juice approximately 30 minutes before bed, then waking up one hour earlier than usual. Four days before your trip, drink 4 ounces of tart cherry juice (for natural melatonin) with 400 milligrams of valerian about 30 minutes before bed. Go to bed and wake up 1 hour earlier than usual. When you wake up, start the “wakeful” process by opening your curtains to bright sunlight or going outside.”

Nandan Nilekani: “India is upgrading. It is going from being an offline, cash-based, informal and low-productivity economy to an online, cashless, formal and high-productivity one… Building on the country’s successes with IT services, the nation has been able to harness governmental scale, technocratic zeal and socio-economic aspirations to invent the India Stack—a bouquet of technological goods spanning unique identification, digital documentation and finance with the potential to alter the country’s destiny.“

Anticipating the Unintended asks if India can industrialise: “Despite all the hype around Make in India and the rising ease of doing business rankings, it is still quite difficult to start and run a business in India. The state is deeply entrenched in controlling capital in India, and it enjoys the arbitrary power that it has over them that it is impossible to change this with just better optics of ‘single window’, tax holidays or investment roadshows. In the last two decades, the state has retreated a bit in some areas, but paradoxically, with greater digitisation, it has more information and, therefore, greater power over industry. My general contention is that the state can continue with its welfarism (or whatever else you may call it) on the social and political front, but for India to industrialise, the state has to retreat on the economic control it wields. This looks very difficult today because the state’s first goal is to perpetuate itself. It will require the PM to go back to some of his campaign promises of pre-2014 with real conviction…My view is we will industrialise a bit faster than in the past, but we are going to fall short of the expectations of the kind of industrialisation that’s expected for us to increase our per capita income from $2000 to $10,000 in the next 15 years.”

Andre Plaut writes that Twitter’s killer app is real-time search: “Twitter has a tremendous amount of live, real-time data about what’s happening where. This makes Twitter unique as a service—it encourages its users to create in-and-of-the-moment content. They share what they’re seeing, thinking, feeling, and experiencing now…Something happens, and seconds later, people turn to Twitter.”

Raghu Raman: “Leaders across organizations follow growth journeys through four stages: Tactical, Operational, Strategic and Doctrinal. Leaders (or heroes, since every individual is the protagonist of one’s own life) begin their journey at the tactical stage. This is usually the first 5-10 years of their career where the key success components are basic knowledge of their professional domains, a high degree of positive energy and a can-do attitude. At tactical levels, the idea is to forge ahead under guidance and figure out a path along the way. Once leaders transition to the operational stage, their role requires an ability to create collaborative alliances. They must recognize that ostensibly adversarial attitudes within the same organisation are required for robust growth…At strategic levels, the primary role of leaders is capacity building for the future. A leader must have a view of ‘over the horizon’ events and discern sense from feeble signals heralding changes in the environment…At the doctrinal stage, the leader attains the altitude and influence to be able to shape the environment in terms of guiding policies, mediating intractable short versus long-term choices, navigating contradictory asks and also advocating orbit-shifting ideas.”

Paul Zak (HBR, 2014): “My research has also shown that stories are useful inside organizations. We know that people are substantially more motivated by their organization’s transcendent purpose (how it improves lives) than by its transactional purpose (how it sells goods and services).  Transcendent purpose is effectively communicated through stories – for example, by describing the pitiable situations of actual, named customers and how their problems were solved by your efforts. Make your people empathize with the pain the customer experiened and they will also feel the pleasure of its resolution – all the more if some heroics went in to reducing suffering or struggle, or producing joy. Many of us know from Joseph Campbell’s work that enduring stories tend to share a dramatic arc in which a character struggles and eventually finds heretofore unknown abilities and uses these to triumph over adversity; my work shows that the brain is highly attracted to this story style…When you want to motivate, persuade, or be remembered, start with a story of human struggle and eventual triumph. It will capture people’s hearts – by first attracting their brains.”

Vivek Murthy (US context): “Loneliness and isolation hurt whole communities. Social disconnection is associated with reduced productivity in the workplace, worse performance in school, and diminished civic engagement. When we are less invested in one another, we are more susceptible to polarization and less able to pull together to face the challenges that we cannot solve alone…As it has built for decades, the epidemic of loneliness and isolation has fueled other problems that are killing us and threaten to rip our country apart. Given these extraordinary costs, rebuilding social connection must be a top public health priority for our nation. It will require reorienting ourselves, our communities, and our institutions to prioritize human connection and healthy relationships. The good news is we know how to do this…Evidence shows that connection is linked to better heart health, brain health and immunity. It could be spending 15 minutes each day to reach out to people we care about, introducing ourselves to our neighbors, checking on co-workers who may be having a hard time, sitting down with people with different views to get to know and understand them, and seeking opportunities to serve others recognizing that helping people is one of the most powerful antidotes to loneliness.”

Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman: “According to [Indian] government data, roughly $45 billion in direct cash payments were delivered in the fiscal year that just ended, benefiting about 700 million (not necessarily distinct) people via 265 public schemes. If transfers from state governments were included, these figures would be even larger. Taken together, the cash transfers are tantamount to a universal basic income…Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unique approach to redistribution, which one of us dubbed “New Welfarism,” emphasises funding for items such as toilets that are essential but normally provisioned privately, as opposed to public goods such as primary education and basic health care.”

Laura Williams: “The pineapple trade is now highly industrialized. Chemicals that ripen fruit — the same ones that ripe bananas emit — are added to crops a week before harvest. Refrigerated shipping containers on ships, planes, and trucks allow whole pineapples to be delivered fresh, worldwide, with little loss to bruising or rot. Grocery stores do a healthy trade in whole, fresh pineapples; cored and prepared pineapple; and canned and dried varieties. If you want a taste of pineapple today, almost anywhere in the world, you can get it for under a dollar…Pineapples were once a supreme luxury item, which (through a combination of industrial process improvement, specialization, and relocation to regions with marginal advantages in pineapple growing) have become accessible to almost everyone. When past centuries’ most-iconic luxuries become commonplace and affordable, we always have specialization and market innovations to thank.”

Amjad Masad: “Learning how to code becomes more important in a world with AI. AI means that the return on investment from learning to code just went way up. AI models are great at generating code, but they go off the rails easily. They’re inherently statistical and stochastic, so they make a lot of mistakes. That will get better asymptotically, but for the foreseeable future, they’ll need human input. That means in this new world, you can suddenly build incredible things by leveraging these tools to generate code. And, if you can program, you can understand where they’re getting things wrong and fill in the gaps. You become less of a traditional programmer and more of a guide to bring your ideas to life. These are inherently augmenting technologies, not automating technologies.”