Rajesh Jain

WSJ writes on how Loego beat Barbie and Monopoly: “The widening gap between Lego and its rivals has been driven by success in tapping new markets such as China, engaging new generations of fans with the help of movie and videogame tie-ups and piggybacking on the appeal of other popular brands, notably Star Wars, with themed sets. The company has also benefited from rolling out more of its own stores and having its own dedicated factories, close to end markets, which have allowed it to largely avoid supply-chain snags.”

Raghu Raman: “While visionary leaders foresee the future, legendary leaders have the ability to simplify and institutionalize their vision. This is the story of one such iconic corporate leader I had the privilege to work with. During a complex review meeting, he simplified four critical chasms that all organizations must leap across, regardless of their size or industry….The first of these journeys is from confusion to clarity…The second chasm is from competence to capability…The third chasm is from concern to confidence…The last and perhaps most important chasm to be crossed is from criticism to celebration.”

Atanu Dey offers some quotes from David Hume: “Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few…It is seldom, that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom, that it must steal upon them by degrees, and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes, in order to be received…Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude…No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion…The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness.”

Benedict Evans: “Retail, search and Amazon’s $40bn ‘advertising’ business Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year – bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS…The broader story of Amazon Ads, of course, is the ‘retail media’ gold rush: the realisation that a high-traffic website or app could be ad inventory even if you’re not a media company, that you have very relevant ‘consented’ first party data (at the very least intent if not broader profiles) and probably purchase attribution too, that all of this now has more relative value given the push against cookies and third party data everywhere else – and that advertising margins are a lot higher than retail margins. Hence, Walmart had $2.7b of ad revenue last year (New York Times ad revenue was $523m) and Uber is at $500m run rate. GroupM thinks the whole segment was 10% of US ad revenue last year.”

Conversations with Tyler: “Yasheng Huang has written two of Tyler’s favorite books on China: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, which contrasts an entrepreneurial rural China and a state-controlled urban China, and The Rise and Fall of the EAST, which argues that Keju — China’s civil service exam system — played a key role in the growth and expanding power of the Chinese state. Yasheng joined Tyler to discuss China’s lackluster technological innovation, why declining foreign investment is more of a concern than a declining population, why Chinese literacy stagnated in the 19th century, how he believes the imperial exam system deprived China of a thriving civil society, why Chinese succession has been so stable, why the Six Dynasties is his favorite period in Chinese history, why there were so few female emperors, why Chinese and Chinese Americans have done less well becoming top CEOs of American companies compared to Indians and Indian Americans, where he’d send someone on a two week trip to China, what he learned from János Kornai, and more.”

Economist: “[TikTok] has changed social media for good—and in a way that will make life harder for incumbent social apps. In less than six years TikTok has weaned the world off old-fashioned social-networking and got it hooked on algorithmically selected short videos. Users love it. The trouble for the platforms is that the new model makes less money than the old one, and may always do so.”

FT: “[Cal] Newport is not the first person to make a name for himself in the time-management space. As he likes to point out, the economic concepts of productivity and value-added labour date back to Adam Smith. While much of the focus in the late 20th century was on trying to get as much done in as short amount of time as possible, most of the more recent popular books on the subject have essentially argued the opposite: that the way to get more done is to do less, exemplified by bestsellers such as Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Newport’s books are part of this oeuvre, tapping into a sense of exhaustion that has surged in the wake of social media and smartphones and the evaporation of work-life boundaries. Being in a massive open-plan room with all of your co-workers makes it hard to focus. But so does being alone, tending to constant Slack notifications and email. It’s for precisely this crisis that Newport offers answers.”

WSJ: “Some people are more sensitive than others. Psychologists, neuroscientists, educators and others refer to them as highly sensitive persons, or HSPs. If you’re not one yourself, I bet you know someone who is. HSPs process information more deeply than other people. They’re very responsive to emotions, both their own and those of others. And they’re often more attuned to sensations, such as taste, touch, sound or smell.  Scientists have been examining HSPs for decades. Researchers believe that sensitivity occurs on a spectrum: About 20% to 30% of people are HSPs, including both men and women. A similar amount have low sensitivity, while the majority are in the middle.  High sensitivity—another term is environmental sensitivity—is an innate, stable trait, requiring some HSPs to employ next-level coping skills. They use strategies such as setting boundaries, scheduling downtime and planning positive experiences. These tactics often enable them to thrive in their personal lives and careers. They are also a great blueprint for everyone.”

Nieman Journalism Lab: “Per capita newspaper circulation has been declining in the United States since World War II, so it’s hardly shocking that it’s still dropping. If you’re The New York Times, you’ve been able to more than make up for the loss in print subscribers with digital ones. But for most local newspapers, digital gains are nowhere big enough to stop the print bleeding…When the local paper stops reporting, there’s often no one else to take its place. Everyone gets a little less informed about the world around them.”

Dan Shipper writes about AI as a copilot for the mind: “Every time you touch the keyboard, the AI downloads and sorts through everything you’ve ever read and uses the sum total of that knowledge to help you complete your sentences. It’ll work in every app that you use, and it will be on your computer and on your phone. And it’ll be incredibly easy to save anything that you want to remember for later. Just take a screenshot, or paste a URL, or upload a file, or send a text, and whatever you’re looking at will be saved and available for your copilot to bring back to you at the right time. A copilot for the mind might be able to find the perfect quote from a book you highlighted 10 years ago to help you make the point you’re trying to make. Or it might suggest relevant counterarguments to help you sharpen your prose—or maybe even change your mind on a topic you’re thinking about.”

WSJ: “The Chinese family is about to undergo a radical and historically unprecedented transition. Extended kinship networks will atrophy nationwide, and the widespread experience of close blood relatives will disappear altogether for many. This is a delayed but inescapable consequence of China’s birth trends from the era of the notorious one-child policy (1980-2015). The withering of the Chinese family will make for new and unfamiliar problems, both for China’s people and its state. Policy makers in China and abroad have scarcely begun to think about the ramifications.”

Himanshu: “Labour data points to significant distress in the Indian economy…A strong piece of evidence of distress is a statistically observed workforce shift back to agriculture, thereby reversing the gains of a structural transformation in the economy between 2004-05 and 2017-18. The absolute number of workers in agriculture declined by 33 million between 2004-05 and 2011-12. Almost a matching decline was observed between 2011-12 and 2017-18. However, the slowdown and pandemic reversed this process. The agricultural sector witnessed a return of 36 million workers between 2017-18 and 2021-22. So pronounced was it that the absolute count of workers in agriculture stood higher in 2021-22 than in 2011-12, a decade ago. Besides a reversal of the structural transformation, the numbers also imply a declining per worker income in agriculture, thereby worsening the rural distress…For the Indian economy to revive, employment in non-agricultural sectors needs to increase along with a rise in income from such employment. This is also necessary for us to make the country’s economic growth more employment-intensive, which would be the best antidote to poverty and distress in the economy.”

Michael Munger: “Destinationism insists that any new policy must be the ideal, or oppose it; directionalism is willing to support any move toward the ideal, if the ideal is not on the table as an alternative.”

Bob Ewing: How to Use AI to Improve Your Public Speaking. “Don’t worry about structure or eloquence. Just verbally process your ideas out loud. If possible, do this while walking outside as it can help stimulate ideas. You can then combine your spoken transcripts with any of your previous notes you have on the topic. By allowing you to focus entirely on your thoughts without worrying about eloquence or the mechanics of transcription, AI makes it that much easier to do the ‘looking in’ that is at the heart of genuine creativity.”

Contrary Research does a deep dive into Substack: “Substack is a subscription-based newsletter publishing platform for independent writers. Substack makes it simple for a writer to start an email newsletter and for readers to find and follow writers whose writing they love to read and support. Substack started as a tool but is trying to become a reading destination. It has a mobile app for a native reading experience and a growing network of writers and readers with social features like recommendations and comments…Substack is entirely free for newsletters that don’t choose to charge readers. For newsletters that do opt to require a paid subscription from their audience, Substack charges a 10% commission + 3% Stripe transaction fee. There are no paid tiers, and the commission is fixed, regardless of the size of a newsletter.” More from The Generalist: “The $650 million startup isn’t a newsletter platform – it’s a multi-media network and cultural powerhouse.”

FT: “A desire to bring people back to the office is driven partly by worries that workers will not be as productive at home — sparking an increase in remote surveillance and encouraging micromanagement at a distance. Meanwhile, workers, reluctant to give up their autonomy, insist that not having to deal with a commute, or the distractions of office life, allows them to be more productive. This is backed by a global study from Slack’s Future Forum, a consortium on new ways of working: it found that employees with full schedule flexibility increased their productivity, achieving “39 per cent higher productivity scores than those with no ability to adjust their working hours and 64 per cent greater ability to focus”.”

Thomas Sowell: “What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? it is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.” [via CafeHayek]

Gareth Edwards: “The easiest way to understand how trust thermoclines work is to look at how they fail. Content services, both print and digital, are particularly prone to these failures. So are social media networks or businesses that focus on delivering quality-of-life monthly services—from TV streaming to beers of the month. Broadly, any business in which the consumer forming an emotional relationship with the product contributes to adoption is at risk of such failures. In most cases, that failure follows a pattern: the company or service will be growing, whether in users or revenue, and perhaps rolling out new products that are bundled within an expanded subscription, or showing good adoption on their own. In many cases, there will not even seem to be a new rival in the market, with existing ones failing to threaten them through market share. Then suddenly, over a short period of time, sales and user numbers collapse. Consumers move to seemingly inferior products or simply disengage completely from the business.”

Economist: “Hype need not end in disappointment. Some technologies are less speculative than others; the metaverse is still largely notional, for example, whereas AI is an established field. Even when bubbles burst, they can leave world-changing companies behind. The hype cycle, popularised by Gartner, a consultancy, is real. In essence, it describes a period of uncontrolled enthusiasm for a new idea followed by a backlash. That makes hype bittersweet for entrepreneurs. Excitement can help unlock funding and attract users. Some think of hype as a public good, vital in enabling new technologies to get going. But it can also lead to problems. The question is how to manage hype for the best.”

Pratap Bhanu Mehta: “Indian democracy since Independence never really had a commitment to decentralisation. Despite performative obeisance to the idea by the state, decentralisation has always been hostage to a number of contradictory impulses. Initially, there was the presumption that centralised power would be required to break the power of local elites, never mind the fact that there is little evidence that the outcomes of decentralisation would have been worse than what we eventually got. The existing tiers of government, both central and state, wanted to hoard most of the resources. India has the lowest spending on local government as a proportion of resources…The non-seriousness about the 73rd and 74th amendments is a lack of seriousness about democracy itself.”

Shane Parrish: “Doing your best isn’t about the result. It’s about the preparation. It’s about the position you find yourself in before you do whatever you are doing. When you put yourself in the proper position, the result takes care of itself. The average person who puts themselves in a great position beats the genius who finds themselves in a poor position.”

Byrne Hobart: “There’s the question of which units have economics worth tracking. An e-commerce platform cares about retention and growth, both from customers and from merchants. Both produce recurring revenue, and both can scale—merchants much more so than customers, of course, but with a higher failure rate. On the other hand, purely optimizing for unit growth has its own risks: a platform dominated by just one customer will find itself squeezed out once it’s more dependent on that counterparty than the counterparty is on it.”