Rajesh Jain

strategy+business: “There are missions, and then there are missions. One type of mission is an achievable task with a fixed goal that is often tactical and short-term in nature. The other mission is a high-level aspiration that provides direction and motivation to an organization over a long period of time. Leaders who mix up the two can put the future of their companies at risk…Don’t mistake a goal—no matter how big, hairy, and audacious—for a compelling organizational mission. You can achieve a goal and put it behind you, but a mission is always up ahead and just beyond your reach.”

Shane Parrish: “To win, you have to avoid losing. The first thing chess masters do after an opponent makes a move isn’t to think about strategy or winning but rather to ask themselves: what’s the threat? Avoid stupidity before seeking brilliance.”

Noah Smith: “Why is India the most important development story on Earth? Two reasons. First of all, sheer size; as of this year, India is the world’s most populous country, overtaking a now-shrinking China…I have to say I’m optimistic about India. Development seems to have a momentum that’s as much psychological as economic — once the people of a country know that they can achieve rapid growth, their hunger is whetted for more. The reforms of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t get India all the way to developed status, but they gave Indians a golden 25 years during which they started to realize just how great their country could become. And I think much of the rest of the world realized it as well. So now is the time to keep pushing, with bold, persistent experimentation.” This is part of The Developing Country Industrialization series.

NYTimes: “Perhaps you spend hours replaying a tense conversation you had with your boss over and over in your head; or maybe you can’t stop thinking about where things went wrong with an ex during the weeks and months after a breakup. If you find that your thoughts are so excessive and overwhelming that you can’t seem to stop them, or if they’re so distracting that you’re falling behind on responsibilities at work or at home, you’re probably experiencing rumination, said Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist in private practice in Atlanta. While rumination is not a mental health condition, it can be a symptom of a larger problem. And in some cases, it can become so encompassing that it requires intervention, Dr. Marks said…What matters most when it comes to rumination is how your thinking makes you feel, Dr. Marks said. If your thoughts are causing distress, anger or anxiety, or if your rumination is pulling you away from important things in your life, that is when it’s a problem.”

Michael Munger: “Capitalism, however, also creates concentrations of economic power because of the ability of successful investors and entrepreneurs to gather large amounts of wealth. Ownership in a capitalist system is both the mechanism for raising liquid capital—by selling shares that are claims against the value of future profits—and a means of controlling substantial resources independent from state direction and control. The private ownership of tools and materials that characterize a market system are on a much smaller scale than the ownership of land and a controlling interest in the shares of joint stock corporations. Nations that do not have the corporate form of private ownership are likely to run up against capital constraints, as it is difficult to generate liquidity on a scale, and in a time frame, that allows the successful exploitation of profit opportunities.”

WSJ: “Mr. [George] Will is fond of an old joke: The first law of economics is, scarcity is real; the first law of politics is, ignore the first law of economics. “Everyone’s agreed on that,” he says. “They say Social Security’s trust fund will be exhausted in 10 years, at which point there will be a mandatory cut of 18% for all benefits. No there won’t. We’ll use general revenues, we’ll go on borrowing.” He ends this polite tirade against the political consensus with a perfectly Willian formulation: “People always ask, ‘What’s the biggest threat to American democracy?’ The biggest threat to American democracy is American democracy. It is the fact that we have incontinent appetites and no restraint on them.””

Eric Ashman: “One of the most complex leadership challenges a founder will grapple with is implementing significant shifts in team or strategy when it’s clear your original assumptions aren’t delivering the expected results. There are two traps to avoid when trying to change the course of your startup. First, don’t change too many things at the same time in a frantic effort to accelerate the impact…Second, avoid the trap of impatience and the resulting constant course correction when you believe the change you seek isn’t coming fast enough.”

Charlie Munger: “America should ban crypto…It isn’t currency. It’s a gambling contract with a nearly 100% edge for the house.”

Marc Andreessen: “Starting a company is a real commitment, it really changes your life. My favorite all time quote on being a startup founder is from Sean Parker, who says —“Starting a company is like chewing glass. Eventually, you start to like the taste of your own blood.” I always get this queasy look on the face of people I’m talking to when I roll that quote out. But it is really intense. Whenever anybody asks me if they should start a company, the answer is always no. Because it’s such a gigantic, emotional, irrational thing to do. The implications of that decision are so profound in terms of how you live your life…When you’re a startup founder, it’s all on you. Everything that happens is on you, everything that goes wrong is on you. When there’s an issue in the company, a crisis in the company, it’s on you to fix it. You’re up at four in the morning all the time worrying about things.”

David Brooks: “If, say, you’re a college student preparing for life in an A.I. world, you need to ask yourself: Which classes will give me the skills that machines will not replicate, making me more distinctly human? You probably want to avoid any class that teaches you to think in an impersonal, linear, generalized kind of way — the kind of thinking A.I. will crush you at. On the other hand, you probably want to gravitate toward any class, in the sciences or the humanities, that will help you develop the following distinctly human skills: a distinct personal voice. presentation skills, a childlike talent for creativity, unusual worldviews, situational awareness.”

NYTimes: “There’s no need to wait for ChatGPT to find a better source of information than Google. For a large number of my most important internet searches these days — when I’m looking to learn something, fix something, buy something or decide something — there are two places I look most often, neither of them Google. One of these places is Reddit…The other is YouTube. The gargantuan video site is a lot of things to a lot of people — in different ways, YouTube is a little bit like TikTok, a little like Twitch and a little like Netflix — but I think we underappreciate how often YouTube is a better Google. That is, often it is the best place online to find reliable and substantive knowledge and information on a huge variety of subjects.”

Atanu Dey: “Reform of the government can only happen if the people change their understanding of the government. But the government controls the systems — education, the media, the intellectuals — that could affect that change in the minds of people. It’s not in the interests of the politicians, bureaucrats and judiciary to make those changes that will reduce their power and prestige. So the same song continues to play and the people continue to faithfully dance to it…Not just economics textbooks, the entire Indian educational curriculum has been designed by an incompetent government since at least one hundred years, and it is no surprise that the people continue to select kakistocratic governments (government by the most corrupt and the least competent.) The vicious circle is completed: education controlled by a kakistocratic government leads to uneducated, ill-informed people, who then select the next set of incompetent crooks (politicians, bureaucrats, intellectuals) to lead them.”

Bloomberg: “Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a message for investors. Prepare for a painful return to reality. “Disneyland is over, the children go back to school,” the author of “The Black Swan” said. “It’s not going to be as smooth as it was the last 15 years.” A generation of near-zero interest rates triggered a monumental series of asset bubbles and turbocharged inequality, Taleb said…Investors are largely unequipped for a high-interest world as the Federal Reserve raises rates to levels more compatible with history, he said. Taleb described a generation of investors who over the past 15 years forgot the importance of cash flow as the financial crisis unleashed a wave of easy money. He said crypto was indicative of the naivete in markets after years of low rates. “All these years, assets were inflating like crazy,” Taleb said. “It’s like a tumor, I think is the best explanation.” Taleb identified the “tumors” as everything from Bitcoin to real estate prices that have ballooned under a low interest regime. He estimated such “illusionary wealth” at more than half a trillion dollars as he predicted the Federal Reserve is going to keep raising rates.”

Mint: “A real time fiscal data portal that tells us how funds are flowing across the three tiers of government—Centre, state and local governments—would be an invaluable resource to understand the Indian economy. Such a portal would allow India’s citizens to monitor fund flows minutely. Greater scrutiny of public finances would in turn improve the quality of reporting, driving up the efficiency of public spending. Such a portal would also allow government vendors and related businesses to plan their purchases and inventories better. Financial institutions would be able to estimate borrowing needs of different levels of government accurately.”

Casey Rosengren: “If you want to be a great leader, you need to develop a worldview. You might think you don’t have one—but you probably do. It’s just implicit rather than explicitly articulated. A worldview is a belief system that answers big, philosophical questions about life and existence. It’s what guides our choices and how we orient ourselves in life. Understanding how to articulate and share your worldview with others can be a powerful tool for creating meaning in an organization.”

Economist: “Regardless of the extent to which the generative AI models that underpin ChatGPT and its rivals actually transform business, culture and society, however, it is already transforming how the tech industry thinks about innovation and its engines—the corporate research labs which, like OpenAI and Google Research, are combining big tech’s processing power with the brain power of some of computer science’s brightest sparks. These rival labs—be they part of big tech firms, affiliated with them or run by independent startups—are engaged in an epic race for AI supremacy. The result of that race will determine how quickly the age of AI will dawn for computer users everywhere—and who will dominate it.” More: “There is a chance that powerful ai will break the historic mould. A technology capable of handling almost any task the typical person can do would bring humanity into uncharted economic territory. Yet even in such a scenario, the past holds some lessons. The sustained economic growth which accompanied the steam revolution, and the further acceleration which came along with electrification and other later innovations, were themselves unprecedented. They prompted a tremendous scramble to invent new ideas and institutions, to make sure that radical economic change translated into broad-based prosperity rather than chaos. It may soon be time to scramble once again.”

WSJ: “99% of big projects go wrong. The economist who spent decades studying them has some advice for getting them right: Think slow, act fast and build brick by tiny plastic brick…In the 1950s, when Lego decided to make one product the centerpiece of its business, the Danish company went looking for a single toy that could be the foundation of an empire. It picked the colorful plastic bricks that have captured the imagination of children ever since. It was a wise choice. It was also a fitting corporate strategy: Lego turned a small thing into something much bigger. “That’s the question every project leader should ask: What is the small thing we can assemble in large numbers into a big thing?” says University of Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg. “What’s our Lego?””

Tim Martinez: “Leaders are the representation of a promise that together, with courage and dedication we can will succeed. Leaders should not represent the lone-wolf who is forging alone in the cold dark night capable of doing it all on their own. There is no glory in that. One of the smartest things you can do as a leader is build a brain trust of advisors that can challenge you while providing perspective and encouragement (and a little tough love). It’s been said – “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.””

Suzy Welch on her course at NYU’s Stern: ““Becoming You,” as I conceived it, would help avert this fate by encouraging M.B.A. students to think about careers another way—as a journey toward their “area of destiny,” the world of opportunity that exists at the intersection of their authentic values, their strongest skills and aptitudes, and the kind of work that interests and excites them intellectually and emotionally. Sure, some of my students would still end up in consulting and banking and tech, but if I taught the class right, others would have their eyes and minds open to—dare I say it—jobs in industry. That’s right, in companies decidedly not selling advice, professional services or shipping software and devices conceived by engineers—but making and doing real stuff.”

FT: “American crosswords elevate the answers. American setters prioritise fresh and lively fill, plucked anew from an ever-shifting culture and language. A setter’s word list is a prized possession and the clues themselves are, in most cases, little more than an afterthought to get the kapow into the grid. British crosswords, meanwhile, elevate the questions. While the answers are often pedestrian, each clue in a cryptic is a mystery unto itself, a deviously constructed linguistic locking mechanism, unopenable, until you open it. In this sense a cryptic is not a single puzzle at all but a puzzle made of puzzles. Solving an American puzzle is an exciting smash-and-grab job. Solving a cryptic is a sophisticated bank heist.”

Carolyn Coughlin: “Listening to win is, ‘Let me make the problem go away by telling you, you don’t have a problem.’ Listening to learn is getting underneath what’s being said and reflecting back to the person. And listening to fix is, ‘Let me take your problem and solve it for you, or help you solve it.'” [via Shane Parrish]

Ezra Klein: “Barnes & Noble’s resurgence is a reminder that there is nothing inevitable about its (or any bookstore’s) demise. Great bookstores and libraries still provide something the digital world cannot: a place not just to buy or borrow books, but to be among them.”

Mahesh Vyas: “Most of the employed persons in India are poorly educated. The maximum education of a bulk of those employed in India is high school graduation. As of Sept­em­ber-December 2022, nearly 40 per cent of the workforce (we use the term to represent those who are employed) were high school graduates. The maximum educa­t­ion achieved by them was bet­ween the 10th and 12th standards. India suffers from a poorly educated workforce that is confined to poor quality jobs. Most employment is informal and in the unorganised sector. This is not new. But India is still unable to solve this old problem. Forty-eight per cent of the workforce had not even cleared their 10th exams — 28 per cent had cleared between the 6th and 9th standards and 20 per cent had cleared only the 5th stand­ard. The last 20 per cent — those that cleared the 5th standard — could be considered largely uneducated because it may not be necessary to clear exams to be promoted from one class to the other till the 5th standard. Only 12 per cent of the workforce was a graduate or postgraduate. For reference, that ratio in the US is about 44 per cent for persons of 25 years or more.”

Ruchi Gupta: “The ability to remake a party requires three things of the leadership: first, the ability to consolidate power and enforce one’s will on the party; second, to effect wholesale change in the organisation and exercise control over those remaining; third, provide new messaging for the party which either shapes or responds to the feedback from the ground…A review of the trajectory of parties in our country and around the world shows that political parties are defined by their top leadership. Thus, each new leader has significant power to remake their party. The reason political parties in India seem mired in their past has less to do with voters’ preoccupation with history but more because there has been very little churn in the party organisation.”

Arvind Narayanan: Sayash Kapoor and I call [ChatGPT] a bullshit generator, as have others as well. We mean this not in a normative sense but in a relatively precise sense. We mean that it is trained to produce plausible text. It is very good at being persuasive, but it’s not trained to produce true statements. It often produces true statements as a side effect of being plausible and persuasive, but that is not the goal. This actually matches what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt has called bullshit, which is speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. A human bullshitter doesn’t care if what they’re saying is true or not; they have certain ends in mind. As long as they persuade, those ends are met. Effectively, that is what ChatGPT is doing. It is trying to be persuasive, and it has no way to know for sure whether the statements it makes are true or not.”

NYTimes: “Once A.I. can run disinformation campaigns at lightning speed, will democracy stand a chance? We seem headed toward a Matrix where “it will become cheaper to show fakes than to show reality,” Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, wrote in Tablet. Will bad actors use A.I. to promote bigotry or hijack nuclear weapons?”

Noah Smith: “Basing wealth on productive assets instead of unproductive land is good for the economy — housing scarcity might pump up prices and build individual wealth for homeowners, but at the national level it simply holds back economic growth. And as it turns out, it’s good for middle-class wealth as well — in 2022, Japan’s median wealth per adult was about $120,000, compared to around $93,000 in the U.S. (And this is despite the fact that Japan’s once-legendary household savings rate has collapsed!) So Japan’s somewhat unusual choice not to tie middle-class wealth to housing prices seems like a smart one. Over the past two decades, the country has done better in terms of housing policy, construction, landscaping and urbanism than just about any country in the West. And it did this by embracing constant change rather than the physical stagnation that has prevailed in Western cities.”

Terminus: “According to Terminus’ new ABM Benchmark Report: B2B Digital Advertising which offers best practices for branding, messaging and imagery, other ABM platforms report an average of 8-20% ad fraud rates. The total cost of ad fraud exceeded $81 billion in 2022, and is expected to increase to $100 billion by 2023, according to Statista research.”