Rajesh Jain

strategy+business: ““We think of organizations as decision factories,” write professors Don A. Moore and Max H. Bazerman in their new book, Decision Leadership. It’s an apt simile. Knowledge workers, whose output is typically decision-driven, now number more than 1 billion worldwide. Moreover, as the number of rote tasks that are automated increases, many more employees are being freed for higher-level work that entails decision-making…“We aim to define leadership in a new way, one grounded in the belief that leaders’ success depends not only on their ability to make good decisions but also on their ability to help others make wise decisions,” they write. “In our view, great leaders create the norms, structures, incentives, and systems that allow their direct reports, the broader organization, consumers, investors, and other stakeholders to make decisions that maximize collective benefit through value creation.” To support their new definition of leadership, Moore and Bazerman seek to weave together the various threads of behavioral economics that pertain to decision-making and then translate them into practical advice for leaders who want to both improve the quality of their own decisions and bolster the decision prowess of their companies.”

50xpodcast looks interesting. “We track the often circuitous route to exceptional long-term returns, exploring the foundations of value creation and how that rarest of investment commodities—conviction—is created, maintained, threatened, and sometimes lost…We look in detail at an investment that has appreciated at least 50-fold. From the seat of the professional investor and occasionally the CEO, we explore its origins, evolution, and eventual outcome, studying key themes around long-term value creation ranging from operations, capital allocation, and culture to pivotal buy and sell decisions. To enhance the quality and depth of our interviews, we rigorously study each asset in advance, diving into all available public and private resources.” The first company analysed: TransDigm. “Since inception in 1993, TransDigm has returned over 1,750X its primary equity and a remarkably evenly distributed 36% IRR.”

Read: Death and the Conjuror by Tom Mead. It is a locked-room mystery.

Roger Martin about his book “A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness: “If you base your strategy on analyzing the past, then you are implicitly making the assumption that the future will be identical to the past. Because it’s based on rigorous analysis—and you’ve been taught in business school that rigorous analysis is correct—then you will not be ready for the future to end up looking different than the past, and you’re more likely to stick with your strategy for longer because it’s ‘right,’ based on the analysis…It’s mainly an exercise in freeing people up, in saying to them that in order to shape your strategy for the future, you don’t have to go by what the data say. What you can do is imagine things that you think would be better for us, better for the consumer, better for the world, etcetera, and then we’ll test those.”

FT on the idea of a “tactical meeting”: “The format comes from Holacracy, a type of flat organisational structure, but tactical meetings can be useful regardless of how your company is organised. A tactical starts with some general housekeeping: everyone checks in, then a facilitator runs through action items from the previous tactical, and receives updates on whether they’ve been completed. A note taker checks off action items and records other relevant details, such as if the due date of a project has changed. It’s important that these updates don’t spin off into discussions — hold questions and concerns for the next phase of the meeting. Next, build a rapid-fire agenda of “tensions” — these can be questions, requests, updates, or other issues that need buy-in or collaboration from the group…Once the agenda is set, work through each tension. Problems aren’t necessarily solved within the meeting, but as long as a next step is discussed and assigned to someone as an action item, then you can declare the “tension resolved”, cross it off, and move on to the next one.”

Read: Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Daniel Silva

David Gergen about his book, “Hearts Touched With Fire: How Great Leaders are Made“: “I think it’s time for the older generation to step aside and pass the baton to the new generation. I’m included among that. Those of us who are older can still be helpful, we can still support people who are younger, we can still offer counsel if it’s requested, we can still do things at the community level, but we need fresh energy in this country. We need fresh leadership, and that has to come, not just at the community level, but at the national level as well. I think we can do it. I think we’re capable of doing that, but we have to get on with it…People love to tear down. It’s almost like playing King of the Mountain, a game where you want to get to the top of a mound to be king of the mountain, and somebody else wants to pull you down right away. That’s sort of how our political and public life is these days.”

Matthew Hennessey: “Prices coordinate markets. Like buoys on a lake, they help market participants – buyers and sellers – navigate when they can’t see shore. They provide markers on an unmapped route.” [via CafeHayek]

Eleanor Roosevelt on the link between personal philosophy and action: ““One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” [via Shane Parish]

Sandeep Dayal about his book “Branding between the Ears: Using Cognitive Science to Build Lasting Customer Connections“: “When you look at cognitive psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, linguistics, and social anthropology, they have one thing in common: they’ve all been trying to understand why people behave in a certain way, and they’ve all been trying to understand, “How does the human brain work?” All of that knowledge has been applied in different areas, such as public policy, investing, and finance, but, for whatever reason, it wasn’t applied to branding. If you think about what branding is, it’s about influencing consumer choice, and if you’re going to influence consumer choice, then you want to understand how the brain works so that you can be more effective in making those influences work…Ninety-five percent of the time, we are making brand choices instinctively, and only 5 percent of the time will we sit around and create a spreadsheet or a systematic comparison. So then, how do we make choices instinctively? We rely on certain simplifying rules, and those rules are stored in our brains. Some people call these rules cognitive biases, but I prefer to call them ‘cognitive wisdom’ because they help us get by in life.”

FT: “Eric Schmidt…thinks the next big thing is the “bioeconomy”, not the internet. This catch-all label, Schmidt explained to me at the Aspen Ideas forum last month, describes “the use of biological processes to make use of things that we consume and manufacture… advances in essentially molecular biology… plus advances in AI have allowed us to do new techniques and grow new things.” Helpfully, he listed a few innovations this economy might include: new plastics that naturally degrade without polluting water, “biologically neutral” cement that does not hurt the environment, soil microbes that reduce fertiliser use, soy-based roof-coating that reduces urban heat and, my favourite, compostable dining ware such as edible forks. Put another way, the bioeconomy is based on stuff that is grown using synthetic biology.”

Thomas Sowell: “Going into debt to create long-term investments makes as much sense for the government as for a private individual’s borrowing more than his annual income to buy a house. By the same token, people who borrow more than their annual income to pay for lavish entertainment this year are simply living beyond their means and probably heading for big financial trouble. The same principle applies to government expenditures for current benefits, with the costs being passed on to future generations.” [via CafeHayek]

Benedict Evans: “The breakthrough of the web was effectively that you get this phrase “permissionless innovation.” That anybody could just make stuff and distribute it instantly to everybody on Earth. And you don’t need to get a carriage deal with every telco in every country. You don’t need to get a distribution deal. You don’t need to go and talk to a publishing company. What the internet did, you could say, is massively expanded the scope of the free market. Because by analogy, you could say that telcos and publishing companies and so on were central planning. That they were this massive bottleneck on what you could do.”

Tips for Productivity, Thinking, and Doing by Nabeel Qureshi. Among them: “Do the most important thing first thing in the morning, and don’t check social media until you’ve done it. Because energy compounds, the first actions in the day matter a lot: the right actions get you into a positive spiral, the wrong actions get you into a negative spiral. The further into a negative spiral you get, the harder it is to get out. So if you start the morning by doing something you care about (e.g. writing a page of an essay), you are way more likely to have a good, productive and happy day overall, because you’ve gotten yourself into a positive spiral.”

Sebastian Mallaby: “The real test for crypto is whether it creates services that non-crypto people care about. On this, the jury is still out, but the tentative evidence is promising. Digital tokens can create clever customer incentives — think a more sophisticated version of air miles. Crypto payments may generate cheaper ways to remit money across borders. Play-to-earn computer games, with digital assets that users stash in personal wallets, may bring a new dimension to the already vast gaming industry…Today’s internet renders frictionless the storage, transfer and sharing of information. Already, we cannot imagine life without it. Tomorrow’s crypto- and blockchain-enhanced internet may achieve the same for value.”