Rajesh Jain

NYTimes: “Tai Chi is a traditional Chinese martial art with complex, flowing poses — known as forms — that integrate movement, breath and mindfulness. Typically, Tai Chi walking (or Tai Chi gait) is the first thing that new students learn. “It’s the most fundamental movement for Tai Chi practice,” said Feng Yang, an associate professor of biomechanics, kinesiology and health at Georgia State University, who practices and studies Tai Chi. When you walk normally, you push off from one step to the next, using momentum to propel you forward. Tai Chi walking takes away the pushing, slowing everything down until you have total control of each movement. “Some people call Tai Chi gait a catlike walk,” Dr. Yang said. “You need to walk very slowly and silently.””

McKinsey’s questions for growth leaders: “Are our growth aspirations and commitments bold enough to allow us to grow faster and more profitably than the market? Do our resource allocations match our growth priorities? How many independent growth engines do we actually have today—and how many rely entirely on the core? Which adjacencies genuinely build on our strengths, and which are distractions dressed up as growth? Where can AI and agentic AI help us build up our competitive advantages? Which strategically critical capabilities should we build organically, and which would benefit from being developed through thoughtful partnerships or acquisitions?”

WSJ: “AI-written code may replace minor applications, but it isn’t dependable enough to write anything essential on its own. I talk to a lot of customers, and none has yet suggested they might vibe-code a critical system. In the end, AI-generated code may do more to lower costs for software companies than it does to lower prices for their consumers. The software industry will survive its second free-code scare. As Safra Catz of Oracle said in 2012, “If you are in this business long enough, you hear about a thousand things that are going to kill you. Open source? Yeah, we are not dead yet.””

NYTimes: “In the future that Elon Musk envisions, humans won’t just live on Mars. They will also never have to work again. Money will be irrelevant. And everything they could ever want will be immediately accessible. This is what Mr. Musk calls “sustainable abundance,” a post-scarcity society where humans have created technologies so ubiquitous and so powerful that they have eliminated the need for labor.”

NYTimes: “Planning a strength training regimen can feel overwhelming. You have to work your upper and lower body, focus on mobility and build grip strength if you have time. Wouldn’t it be easier to if you could train multiple regions at once? That’s the logic behind combination exercises, which string together two or more moves, making it easier to cover more muscle groups quickly. This not only works the targeted muscles, it also hits smaller, supporting ones during the transitions from one move to the next, said Katy Bowman, a movement teacher in Carlsborg, Wash., and author of “Move Your DNA.””

Danny Crichton: “No discussion of tech media can get past this basic traffic fact: in the AI world, Google and social no longer refer traffic, which means that the vast majority of readers just never find you in the first place.”

Aaron Zamost: “When I use these [AI coding] tools, I conclude an imaginative, future-forward company may want to increase hiring, at least of people who know how to use them creatively. In many or even most scenarios, the bottleneck that prevents the discovery of what your product should be or how you should improve the one you have is the time and effort it takes to sandbox and try out new ideas and the social blocking that occurs in meetings. Like the individual-focused PC—as opposed to the “efficiency”-oriented mainframes that preceded it—these tools mostly empower the individual to leapfrog these impediments.”

FT: “Academics at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business have been doing ethnographic research into how technology workers are using generative AI. Some will tell you that ethnographic business research is both the worst kind of business research and the worst kind of ethnography, but I admit to a soft spot for this stuff. What the researchers found was the opposite of Adams’ morose Vogon guard: the minutes are amazing but the hours are terrible. “In micro moments of prompting, iterating and experimenting, people talked about momentum and a sense of expanded capability,” researcher Xingqi Maggie Ye explained. “But when they stepped back and reflected on their broader work experience, a different tone sometimes emerged. They described feeling busier, more stretched, or less able to fully disconnect.” These tech workers felt that generative AI was making them dramatically more productive and capable — but they were also trying to do more, voluntarily working longer hours, and hurtling towards burnout.”

Asian Paints CEO Amit Syngle: “Based on our research, a lot of our marketing efforts have been shifting from just a central initiative to regional markets and micro marketing. For example, in Tamil Nadu, we launched Varnamaalai, a shade guide based on the soaps that Sun TV was showcasing. In West Bengal, we did a pack which had the elements of Durga Puja, the Howrah Bridge and the trams of Kolkata. Because of regionalisation, paint cans, which were earlier used in bathrooms and kitchens, are now adorning living rooms. While it has led to a significant increase in our marketing budget, we think it is a worthwhile return on what we spend, rather than just spending on a national framework, which we continue to do.”

Bloomberg: “India is fast becoming one of the world’s biggest AI user bases. The question now is how it can turn that scale into superpower status rather than just training Silicon Valley for free. That will be a tall order for a country largely caught flat-footed by the boom. But let’s start with the basics: The three main building blocks of AI are talent, compute (including high-end chips and infrastructure), and data. India doesn’t lack engineers, but it currently doesn’t have foundational research training at scale or enough advanced processors at public labs and universities. What it does have, in abundance, is data. It should start treating this like a strategic asset rather than leaking it out as a free export.”

Activate: “After years of discussion about India’s potential in AI, the first wave of AI-native unicorns is now beginning to form across infrastructure, applications, and foundation models. Some are being built to power India’s own AI ecosystem, while others are building global products from Indian talent. For the first time, both of those stories are unfolding at the same moment.”

Arnold Kling: “I think that the potential for AI to increase productivity is very high. But I look at faculty at universities, for example, and think that the chances for realizing these productivity gains are pretty low. To take advantage of AI, you need to be willing to completely re-think your mission and your role. My guess is that the professionals at large incumbent organizations who are most willing to do that are also the ones most likely to leave and strike out on their own. What organizations will be left with are the folks who are inclined toward denial and resistance.”

Bloomberg: “Far from freeing up engineers for a life of leisure, increasingly capable AI coding agents—including Anthropic PBC’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex—have over the past few months created a kind of productivity paranoia among executives and, by extension, the people who work for them. These agents do more than generate text or images, as consumer-facing chatbots do. Instead they plan, execute and complete tasks on behalf of their human users, even creating their own agents to do the work for them. That may mean building and debugging an app, scheduling a meeting or buying a pair of pants, all with minimal human oversight. The fact that AI agents can produce more code than mere humans in less time has morphed into a sense that they therefore must. As OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, recently put it on X, it “feels like such a wasted opportunity every moment your agents aren’t running.””

Ajay Shah on the Indian IT industry: “From the point of view of investment and corporate finance, big changes are required. Historically, Indian IT firms have exhibited the financial characteristics of stable utilities. There was a bias toward distributing cash to shareholders rather than reinvesting it in research and development. This strategy of capital allocation must change. The financial system must transition from pricing these firms as low-risk utilities to valuing them as complex, adaptive, technology integrators. Management teams must alter how they communicate with capital markets. Boards must show their portfolio of technological bets to the financial system, outlining the risk of their AI investment and its potential return. The world will always want intellectual capability. The constraint on growth is not the capability of algorithms but the availability of human ingenuity. The task for India is to double down on producing, owning, and growing intellectual capital, in the emergence of a firm culture of knowledge and innovation.”

TheMaxSource: “Zero based budgeting requires every expense to be justified from the ground up, as if the company were starting fresh. This method is not simply about cutting costs. It is about allocating money only to activities that create real value. For founders and executives, zero based budgeting brings clarity, accountability and speed. It eliminates autopilot spending and replaces it with intentional decision making.”

McKinsey: “India’s retail landscape is deeply fragmented, shaped by decades of traditional distribution networks, regional supply chains, and a political economy that reinforces support for micro, small, and medium-size enterprises (MSMEs) as an important driver of employment. Nearly 60 million MSMEs form the backbone of this ecosystem, collectively contributing close to $1 trillion in value to the economy every year, which is roughly 30 percent of national GDP. These MSMEs operate across multiple subsegments defined by category, geography, scale, and formality. Fragmentation is structural and likely to persist, creating a unique environment where small sellers and local traders coexist alongside large national and international retailers. We therefore believe this large, fragmented, and growing group of sellers will seek services and digital solutions that are fit-for-purpose: unbundled, flexible, lower-cost and more “consumer direct” relative to offerings provided by today’s dominant marketplaces.”

Scott Dyreng: “This term, I am experimenting with AI-assisted tools that are bringing back team culture by using AI to encourage more, not less, human interaction. Teams record their meetings, and internally developed AI tools analyze their interactions. Did one person do all the talking? Did someone interrupt constantly? Did the team ask good questions or slide into polite agreement? Did anyone summarize decisions and assign next steps? Did the team actually debate alternatives or simply divide the work and disperse? When the first results came in, I was blown away. The new tools compelled students to interact and gave them feedback they can use to hone those skills. In the workplace, people often have only vague impressions about team dynamics. In school, we can make patterns visible while students can still change them.”

India Dispatch: “India’s software and IT-enabled exports were roughly $205 billion in FY25, per the RBI’s annual survey of software export companies. The claim that this entire edifice was built on “one value proposition” — cheap developers — highlights great misunderstanding in what these companies actually do for a living. The technology stacks of the world’s largest enterprises are sprawling, non-monolithic, and take years to adapt to each new wave — and the work Indian IT companies do is overwhelmingly not greenfield coding. Custom application maintenance alone accounts for roughly 35% of a typical Indian IT company’s revenue, per HSBC’s service-line framework: incident management, service requests, change requests and problem resolution across architectures where SAP, Salesforce, Snowflake, Databricks, Guidewire and ServiceNow coexist in configurations unique to each client.”

WSJ: “The elements of the periodic table that revolutionised chemistry as a scientific field more than 150 years ago are now at the heart of a momentous modern commercial and geopolitical battle. The contest is playing out from corporate boardrooms planning mining megadeals to US efforts to form a “critical minerals” trade zone to counter China’s influence. Dozens of the world’s nearly 100 naturally occurring elements are in growing demand for crucial industrial uses, making their supply expensive, prone to shortages or vulnerable to international tensions.”

Daniel Coyle, author of  Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment: “Things that appear risky on the surface, especially in a business environment where we are averse to risk, actually reflect a deep distinction that not many people understand. We typically suffer from a “straight-line illusion.” Though we think of “complicated” and “complex” as being the same, there’s a profound distinction between those two words. Complicated things come together the same way every time. For example, I can give you the instructions for building a Ford Mustang car. If you have all the materials and you follow the instructions, you will have a Mustang at the end, without question. Complex things change when you interact with them. The question that highlights this distinction is “Is this problem more like building a car, or is it more like raising a teen?” Obviously, there’s no set of instructions I could give you to raise a teen. That’s complex. If you have a complicated system, the best approach is to have expertise. Find an expert who can figure out what to do.”