Rajesh Jain

Abhisek Mukherjee: “The real hard work on M&As starts after the transaction is closed…Transactions are good, but the euphoria is short-lived. The hard work comes after. Boards, CEOs, and shareholders benefit only when the long-term investment rationales are achieved.”

FT speaking to T Rowe Price’s Bill Stromberg on culture: “Culture is essential to employee retention, and more fragile than many managers realise. It only takes one bad boss to disenchant a team full of talent. “Reputations are built very slowly over time, but they can deteriorate very quickly if management doesn’t walk the walk,” he says. Good culture does not happen by accident. If companies want a special culture, Stromberg says, that requires “hiring with culture in mind, promoting people with culture in mind, and firing people with culture in mind.””

Karen Lamb: “A year from now you will wish you had started today.” [via Shane Parish]

Do Kown of Terra, which is building a new financial system: “I think building a real economy on the internet is something that is of value. And the reason why I think this is of value is because while reality is constricted by physical laws, and admittedly, this is part of what makes reality beautiful, but at the same time is what makes reality broken. The only thing that limits us on the internet is human ingenuity. So the types of things that we are able to build on the open web are going to be significantly more sophisticated, significantly more value-additive than the things that we can construct in reality.”

The Generalist on Telegram.

Aldus Huxley (decades ago): “There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution…A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” [via Atanu Dey]

2030 by the Numbers: from Subscribed.com. “Total global population in 2030: 8.5 billion. (It’s currently 7.9 billion, and is expected to stop growing entirely by the end of the century). Fastest growing demographic: the elderly, with the population of people over 65 years old at 1 billion by 2030. Percentage of the world’s population living in cities in 2030: over 60%.”

Manish Sabharwal: “India’s Constitution, political parties and civil service created the world’s largest democracy on the infertile soil of the world’s most hierarchical society. But the steel frame of India@0 has become the steel cage of India@75 because of a human capital regime that prevents the identifying, nurturing, and flourishing of civil service equivalents of IPL cricketer Rishab Pant, Maharani series actor Huma Qureshi and Flipkart founder Sachin Bansal. They represent the magic of meritocracies; applying their lessons to a new civil servant HR regime will accelerate our India@100 goal of putting poverty in the museum it belongs.”

Via Shane Parish: “Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves questions about the media we consume: Is this good for me? Is this dense with detailed information? Is this important? Is this going to stand the test of time? Is the person writing someone who is well informed on the issue? Asking those questions makes it clear the news isn’t good for you.”

The Seven Rules of the Metaverse: Tony Parisi. “There is only one Metaverse. The Metaverse is for everyone. Nobody controls the Metaverse. The Metaverse is open. The Metaverse is hardware-independent. The Metaverse is a Network. The Metaverse is the Internet.” And Aaron Frank: How to Explain the ‘Metaverse’ to Your Grandparents. “The Metaverse is the internet, but also a spatial (and often 3D), game engine driven collection of virtual environments.”

Vik Malhotra: “Great CEOs are bold. You can be bold regardless of context. Or you can be bold within that context. If you’re not bold in that first year, you’re not going to move the needle. That is the crux that’ll actually let you conquer any context and any situation around failing. That is your one safeguard against failure.”

15 Self Nudges for Growth: by Vishakha Singh. Among them: “1. To write better, read more. To read better, write notes. 2. A subtle change of a word brings in a substantial effect, both in written and spoken language. And, stay away from negative words. 3. You cannot fight time. Accept it. Good time, bad time, beginning time, end time nothing is in your control. The only thing you can do is accept as it comes and act as judiciously as you can at that moment. “

NYT on the mRNA vaccines story: “Even as the Omicron variant fuels a new wave of the pandemic, the vaccines have proved remarkably resilient at defending against severe illness and death. And the manufacturers, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna, say that mRNA technology will allow them to adapt the vaccines quickly, to fend off whatever dangerous new version of the virus that evolution brings next. Skeptics have seized on the rapid development of the vaccines — among the most impressive feats of medical science in the modern era — to undermine the public’s trust in them. But the breakthroughs behind the vaccines unfolded over decades, little by little, as scientists across the world pursued research in disparate areas, never imagining their work would one day come together to tame the pandemic of the century.”

Anticipating the Unintended: “Every time the government interferes with the price system, the information residing in the price gets diminished. The real-world implications of this loss are all too familiar — price caps lead to shortages and poor quality, price floors lead to wasteful expenditure. Distorting prices costs lives.”

Shane Parish: “Curate your information diet to be rich and diverse. Follow people who think differently than you. Read old books. Remember that what you put into your mind today is the raw material you have to work with tomorrow.”