Rajesh Jain

NYTimes: “We live in a world of widening emotional inequality. The top 20 percent of the world is experiencing the highest level of happiness and well-being since Gallup began measuring these things. The bottom 20 percent is experiencing the worst. It’s a fundamentally unjust and unstable situation. The emotional health of the world is shattering.”

HBR on 1:1 meetings: “You should adopt one of three plans for the frequency of 1:1s: (1) You meet with each of your team members once a week for 30 minutes or so. In my surveys, employees, regardless of job level, rated this approach the most desirable; it also correlated with the highest levels of engagement. (2) In the second-highest-rated plan you meet every other week for 45 to 60 minutes. (3) In a hybrid plan you meet with some team members weekly and others every two weeks. Whichever plan you choose, aim to spend roughly equivalent amounts of time with employees over the course of a month so that all team members get the same in-person support from you.”

Adam Tooze: “With economic and non-economic shocks entangled all the way down, it is little wonder that an unfamiliar term is gaining currency — the polycrisis. A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. At times one feels as if one is losing one’s sense of reality…What makes the crises of the past 15 years so disorientating is that it no longer seems plausible to point to a single cause and, by implication, a single fix.”

Tobi Lutke: “The best thing founders can do is subtraction. It’s much, much, much easier to add things than it is to remove things. Adding things is a lot more expensive than removing things. However, it requires some measure of bravery and risk-taking.” [via Shane Parish]

Anne Lamont on good relationships: “A good marriage is one in which each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal, and this is true also of our friendships.” Bill Lazar: “Both people are putting into the relationship, not for what they’re going to get from it, but for what they can give to it. Because both people are doing that, both people would feel that they are the ones who are the ultimate beneficiary because of how much the other person gives.” [via Shane Parish]

HBR: “Most decisions require two things of the decision-maker: the ability to predict the possible outcomes of a decision, and judgment. Prediction is largely based on data. (Given the available routes and the traffic conditions, how long is the trip likely to take?) Judgment is basically a subjective assessment of contextual factors that are not easily reduced to data. (Will this customer prefer a quick trip or the scenic route?)”

Economist: “India is one of the big development success stories of the past few decades. Since 1980, its GDP per person has grown at an annual average rate of nearly 7% (see chart), a performance matched by only a handful of other countries. But a combination of persistent regional inequality…, fractious state politics and stark differences in population growth threatens to reinforce, and potentially worsen, the country’s political divisions. That, in turn, could hurt future economic growth and make it ever harder to bridge the divide…The southern states make more money while northern states make more babies.”

Julian Simon in 1996: “The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination. The ultimate resource is people – skilled, spirited, hopeful people – who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit as well as in a spirit of faith and social concern. Inevitably they will benefit not only themselves but the poor and the rest of us as well.” [via CafeHayek]

Stéphane Bancel: “Most people think about the future of business from the present onward. As humans we have a natural inclination to think linearly. However, this approach limits our creativity and inhibits our ability to achieve what was previously unimaginable. Consider a better alternative. By thinking five to 10 years out and then “playing the movie backward,” you free yourself from the constraints of what is possible now. You can envision year 10 and then figure out what has to happen in year nine, year eight, and so on for the vision to become reality.”

WSJ: “There’s a stark irony in Mr. Xi’s intensifying shift away from markets, for markets are what made China the economic powerhouse it is today. The robust growth that lifted China from poverty was driven by a hybrid model: a form of state capitalism in which Beijing allowed private ownership and U.S.-style free enterprise to flourish alongside large, low-productivity state-owned enterprises. China’s booming export-related manufacturing was driven by low-cost labor, government investment and highly efficient acquisition of foreign technology and know-how. With free enterprise, human capital flowed into China and drove innovation and productivity. China’s share of global exports rose from 4% in 2000 to 14% in 2015, creating well-paying jobs and domestic prosperity that financed modern urban infrastructure. China accounted for 30% of global growth in this period…By turning away from free enterprise, Xi Jinping ensures that the country’s economy will stop growing.”

McKinsey: Brooke Weddle: “Social capital, simply defined, is the presence of networks, relationships, and connections within any organization or, more broadly, community or culture. It’s been studied for decades, and some of the more recent work by Robert Putnam has emphasized the impact of social capital as it relates to ties in a community.” John Parsons: “With regard to individuals, it’s important to have connections to facilitate greater creativity and greater learning. There’s a lot of research that shows if you are more engaged, you’re more likely to stay. Connectivity can also help with career mobility. If you’re leading teams or you’re a part of a team, social capital is a building block that ultimately leads to that connection, that innovation, and that sharing of ideas.”

Samuel Gregg: “[I]ndustrial policy supposes that if markets apparently fail to produce certain products, or to foster certain economic sectors deemed important for regional or national well-being, the government must intervene to rectify the problem. But what if the failure is not one of the private sector at all? What if the problem is pre-existing high taxes on profits generated by start-ups? Or regulatory barriers to entry for entrepreneurs? Or weak protections for intellectual property rights? Or preexisting subsidies that incentivize businesses to invest in established industries rather than new enterprises? Or some combination of these factors? In short, what if the problem is primarily government failure? Even relatively free economies contain numerous distortions that flow from government interventions that create perverse incentives for labor and capital to flow in less-than-optimal directions. The solution to such problems is less government intervention, not an industrial policy.” [via CafeHayek]

HBR: “When you align your organization’s values with both your strategy and the values of your employees—creating what we call values alignment—you reap all sorts of benefits: higher job satisfaction, lower turnover, better teamwork, more-effective communication, bigger contributions to the organization, more-productive negotiations, and, perhaps surprisingly, more diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our favorite finding involved the impact of values alignment on the turnover of chief operating officers. When we studied the divisions of one multiunit organization, we found that COOs whose values alignment was low needed a salary increase of 40% to become as likely to stay in their jobs as those whose values alignment was high. Imagine that: An increase in values alignment had as great an effect as a 40% raise.”

ThePrint: “Councillors are the bridge between citizens and the government at the ‘first mile’ and are closest to the citizen, quite literally. India’s 87,215 city councillors across its 4,700 plus towns and cities are extremely important but often ignored stakeholders of urban governance. There is lamentable infrastructure, inadequate sanitation and waste management, and we devise solutions without considering the role of elected councillors to run cities…Citizens often reach out to MLAs and MPs instead of councillors. Poor turnout in civic polls is yet another sign that councillors are not valued.”

Hayek: “Differences in wealth, education, tradition, religion, language or race may today become the cause of differential treatment on the pretext of a pretended principle of social justice or of public necessity. Once such discrimination is recognised as legitimate, all the safeguards of individual freedom of the liberal tradition are gone. If it is assumed that whatever the majority decides is just, even if what it lays down is not a general rule, but aims at affecting particular people, it would be expecting too much to believe that a sense of justice will restrain the caprice of the majority: in any group it is soon believed that what is desired by the group is just.” [via CafeHayek]

Ruchir Sharma: “China is now a middle-income country, a stage when many economies naturally start to slow given the higher base. Its per capita income is currently $12,500, one-fifth that of the US. There are 38 advanced economies today, and all of them grew past the $12,500 income level in the decades after the second world war — most quite gradually. Only 19 grew at 2.5 per cent or faster for the next 10 years, and did so with a boost from more workers; on average the working age population grew at 1.2 per cent a year. Only two (Lithuania and Latvia) had a shrinking workforce. China is an outlier. It would be the first large middle-income country to sustain 2.5 per cent gross domestic product growth despite working-age population decline, which began in 2015. And in China this decline is precipitous, on track to contract at an annual rate of nearly 0.5 per cent in the coming decades. Then there’s the debt. In the 19 countries that sustained 2.5 per cent growth after reaching China’s current income level, debt (including government, households and businesses) averaged 170 per cent of GDP. None had debts nearly as high as China’s…China at 2.5 per cent growth has major implications for its ambitions as an economic, diplomatic and military superpower. A lesser China is more likely than the world yet realises.”

Joerg Wuttke: “Xi always says what he thinks. He has always done that, but for a long time it was not noticed in the Western world. The collapse of the Soviet Union had a fundamental impact on him, and he described the three Russian traumas early in his term in office: First, Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin was the original sin for him. Xi would never do such a thing with Mao, and he did so consistently. The old formula of «70% good, 30% bad» set up by Deng with regard to Mao was never heard of again under Xi. Secondly, Perestroika and Glasnost were, in Xi’s view, the catastrophe that led to the failure of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The third Russian trauma for Xi were the oligarchs who became filthy rich under Boris Yeltsin and became a countervailing power to the state. That scenario was out of the question for Xi, which he consistently demonstrated, especially with Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba. Xi is extremely consistent, you have to admire that, and at the same time he is also driven by history. He has studied the fall of the Soviet Union, and he has drawn the conclusion that this will not happen under his rule in China. On the contrary, he wants to show that communism will become a counter-model to capitalism.”

Mint: “McKinsey’s research across more than 1,000 companies identified four key reasons why culture matters to companies. One, culture correlates with performance. Those with top quartile cultures (as measured by McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index) posted a return to shareholders 60 percent higher than median companies and 200 percent higher than those in the bottom quartile. Two, culture is inherently difficult to copy. The ultimate competitive advantage, they found, is a healthy culture that adapts automatically to changing conditions to find new ways to succeed. Three, conversely, unhealthy cultures do not respond well to change. And last but not least, they found that over time, unhealthy cultures lead to underperformance, or worse, failure. These are the crucial old-economy lessons that start-up CEOs need to internalise.”

Ryan Holiday: “One of the interesting lines in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about using the reins of his horse with his non-dominant hand. He says, ‘You get better from the practice of doing it differently.’ And so, I would argue that part of the reason that book one through book five, there is an evolution there, it’s not just that I did that same thing five times, but I also was working on extracurricular activities that made me a better writer.”