French geologists recently discovered that a Himalayan mountain suffered a massive landslide 800 years ago. Massive may be an understatement: the slide moved enough earth to bury Manhattan as high as the Empire State Building. Annapurna IV used to be one of the top-five tallest mountains in the world. Today, after the slide shaved a third of a mile off its top, it’s merely big.
If you only pick up books you know with certainty you’re going to like you’ll confine yourself to reading the same authors on the same topics. It gives fresh oxygen to confirmation bias and limits your ability to connect the dots between different fields and different cultures. It’s better to have a low bar in what books you’re willing to try, and even the faintest tickle of interest should be enough to make the cut. Kindle samples are free, so excuses are minimal.
Over the past decade, psychologists have become increasingly interested in using such mental metamorphoses. Besides altering the quality of our memories, switching between languages can influence people’s financial decision-making and their appraisal of moral dilemmas. By speaking a second language, we can even become more rational, more open-minded and better equipped to deal with uncertainty. This phenomenon is known as the “foreign language effect” and the benefits may be an inspiration for anyone who would like to enrich their mind with the words of another tongue.
Previously on Miscellaneous:
Strategy should be a creative exercise but companies frequently end up with plans that look very much like their previous ones. Strategy expert Graham Kenny describes a three step process for avoiding this trap: 1) open your mind to ideas from external stakeholders, 2) take a cold, hard look at where your performance is failing, and 3) study companies in other
Bronze’s hardness – which revolutionized toolmaking – wasn’t unprecedented. Jade, for example, is also a 6 on the Mohs scale. But jade is rare. Copper and tin were abundant enough that you could make lots of bronze. It was the equivalent of making something very rare very attainable. And it pulled us out of the Stone Age.
Books are easy to take for granted. Not any specific book, I mean: the form of a book. Paper or pixels—it hardly matters. Words in lines on pages in chapters. And at least for non-fiction books, one implied assumption at the foundation: people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. This last idea so invisibly defines the medium that it’s hard not to take for granted, which is a shame because, as we’ll see, it’s quite mistaken.
I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands.
Almost 100 years ago, an evolutionary biologist named Herman Muller came up with a theory that eventually became known as Muller’s Ratchet. It says dangerous mutations tend to pile up when there’s no genetic recombination, which can ultimately lead a species to extinction. In the absence of variety – a male and female mixing genes – dangerous mutations tend to stick around, because there are no new, better, variations to compete the bad stuff out of the gene pool.
About 1% of college basketball players make it to the NBA. That funnel doesn’t seem odd – no one would say college basketball is broken, or a scam, or ineffective at developing great players. It’s obvious that getting to the NBA is really hard, and you can be talented and still not make it. The entire reason pro sports are exciting is because the players do someone almost no one else can do. Michael Jordan is interesting because there’s only one of him.
In crafting strategy, companies often struggle to cope with volatility. Using the traditional strategic-planning model, managers attempt to forecast how markets will evolve and competitors will respond, and then define a multiyear plan for winning in that future state. The organization is then called upon to execute that plan. Performance is routinely monitored, ostensibly to keep everyone on track.
Europe and America excel at lecturing others on what is morally right and economically sensible. But the message that usually comes through – as the persistence of US and European agricultural subsidies makes clear – is “do what I say, not what I do.” Especially after the Trump years, America no longer holds any claim to the moral high ground, nor does it have the credibility to dispense advice. Neoliberalism and trickle-down economics were never widely embraced in the Global South, and now they are going out of fashion everywhere.
Many of us likely forgot one of the most striking things about the last great college sports scandal - not the illegal early recruiting stings, not the under-the-table payments to incoming athletes and their parents, and not even the many perverts caught in the locker and training rooms. It was a revelation from the Varsity Blues scandal, where fancy, famous, and affluent parents bribed coaches and other admissions officers and used fake resumes to get their mediocre offspring admitted to prestigious colleges through the locker room door by claiming that they were serious jocks.
But Bill Gates had it right when he said success is a lousy teacher, because it makes you forget how the world works. That’s especially true when all you focus on is the “success” – the higher stock prices, the higher valuations, the more social media followers – and not the earned work that goes into building enduring success
War means industry. Wars cannot be fought with supply chains that crisscross a globalized world, where production happens on faraway, little islands in the South China Sea, from where chips can be transported only if airspaces and straits remain open…
Saying, “higher gas prices will cause people to drive less,” seems logical.
But then what?
Well, people have to drive, so maybe they’ll look for more fuel-efficient vehicles. They’ll complain to politicians, who will offer tax breaks to buy those vehicles. Oil company CEOs are hauled before Congress; OPEC is asked to drill more. Energy entrepreneurs innovate. And the oil industry knows two speeds: boom and bust. So they’ll probably pump too much. Then prices fall, all while people own more efficient vehicles. Then maybe the suburbs become more popular – and people end up driving even more than before.
So who knows.
If you lead, manage, or plan a workforce, you’re familiar with disruption—and have seen a lot of it lately, including geopolitical and social crises and the biggest public health emergency in living memory. And you’ve spent time and energy on everything from designing remote and hybrid work experiences, to understanding the “great resignation,” to simply trying to keep your people safe.
Against this backdrop, you need to keep sight of the urgent, fast-moving workforce challenges you face—without losing sight of the long game. You need to inspire and support your people now, even as you help them redefine the nature of their jobs and roles so they can thrive in a highly uncertain future. Only by getting the balance right can you create the kinds of sustained outcomes that will benefit the company, your workforce, and even society.
he night before the D-Day invasion, a nervous Franklin Roosevelt asked his wife Eleanor how she felt about not knowing what would happen next.
“To be nearly sixty years old and still rebel at uncertainty is ridiculous isn’t it?” she said.
It is. But my God, we do. And in strange ways.
As we continue to peel the layers of the Chinese onion, we found this brilliant piece which attempts to answer what is behind all the recent crackdown by the Chinese state on tech monopolies or rather who is behind it. Whilst there is no doubt it is Xi Jinping’s Common Prosperity programme, this article in the governance focused magazine Palladium talks about a man who has influenced Xi’s thinking significantly – Wang Huning. The author cites Wang’s writings which have been critical of the American way of life
Chess can serve as an apt metaphor for other areas of our lives, especially business. That’s because the game is a microcosm of the ways we use strategic thinking. There are not many areas where we can quickly assess the quality of our decisions and whether they are likely to have the desired effects. Chess helps us develop strategic thinking because we get immediate feedback on our strategic decisions. It also shows the benefits of thinking ahead.
Forecasting is hard. And not because people aren’t smart, but because trivial accidents can be influential in ways that are impossible to foresee. I did a talk with a high school class last week and someone asked how I decided to become a writer. I said I didn’t, it was never planned. The path that led me here is an absurd story, and one that most of us have a version of – the pure fluke.
America is slowly returning to normal. Stadiums are packed. Travel has bounced back. Restaurant reservations are surging. But even as they resume normal leisure activities, many Americans still aren’t going back to the office. According to data from Kastle Systems, which tracks building access across the country, office attendance is at just 33 percent of its pre-pandemic average. That’s lower than in-person attendance in just about any other industry for which we have good data. Even movie theaters—a business sometimes written off as “doomed”—have recovered almost twice as much.
The next 25 years are very likely to be an era of global progress that will exceed the achievements of the last 25 years. The next human generation will experience — on average, and in aggregate — living standards and possibilities that will reach a record high level for this planet. The distribution of this progress will still be uneven, but all regions will experience more advancement than they have in the past. Given the dire past year, this seems like a wildly optimistic claim. I’ll call this the Bigger, Better Boom.
The former US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, famously said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
So, what’s my takeaway from all of this? Walter Isaacson said in a recent interview that what separated Da Vinci, Franklin, and Jobs was not their intellect. It was their insatiable curiosity and desire to think about the countless things that other people stop noticing after a while. Unfortunately, it often feels like society is suffering from an extreme shortage of this curiosity these days. Ironically, in a world full of information, would one think that people would be *more *curious and *more *interested in learning about all sides of a topic, issue, or debate. Yet, it seems like most people prefer to seek out evidence that confirms their pre-existing beliefs
Historian Will Durant once said, “logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe.” And it often is, which can drive you mad if you expect the world to work in rational ways. A common cause of everything from divisive arguments to bad forecasting is that it can be hard to distinguish what’s happening from what you think should be happening.
The relationship between governments and businesses is always changing. After 1945, many countries sought to rebuild society using firms that were state-owned and -managed. By the 1980s, faced with sclerosis in the West, the state retreated to become an umpire overseeing the rules for private firms to compete in a global market—a lesson learned, in a fashion, by the communist bloc. Now a new and turbulent phase is under way, as citizens demand action on problems, from social justice to the climate. In response, governments are directing firms to make society safer and fairer, but without controlling their shares or their boards. Instead of being the owner or umpire, the state has become the backseat driver. This bossy business interventionism is well-intentioned. But, ultimately, it is a mistake.
One takeaway from this is that no age has a monopoly on insight, and different levels of experience offer different kinds of lessons. Vishal Khandelwal recently wrote that old guys don’t understand tech, but young guys don’t understand risk. Another way to put it is: everyone has something to teach.
Profit desert customers are numerous and diverse, yet they have important latent profits to contribute. The key to success is to deploy a dedicated, multicapability profit desert management team that uses enterprise profit management metrics to micro-target the best profit opportunities, and create highly focused programs that bring your latent profits to your bottom line.
Celebrity bosses used to have nicknames that made a virtue of short fuses and brutality. “Chainsaw Al” and “Neutron Jack” sounded more like wrestlers than men in suits. That kind of moniker would jar today. Inclusivity and empathy are what matter: think “Listening Tim” and “Simpatico Satya”
The mindsets of great problem solvers are just as important as the methods they employ. A mindset that encourages curiosity, embraces imperfection, rewards a dragonfly-eye view of the problem, creates new data from experiments and collective intelligence, and drives action through compelling show-and-tell storytelling creates radical new possibilities under high levels of unpredictability. Of course, these approaches can be helpful in a broad range of circumstances, but in times of massive uncertainty, they are essential.
If Poe relished his escape from these harangues, he may have also realized that he was being set up to fail. Before leaving him in Charlottesville in February of 1826, John Allan handed Poe just $110 (or so Poe would claim later). This when tuition and fees ran closer to $350.
In an excerpt from his new book, longtime Amazon board member Tom Alberg explains the official and unwritten rules that make its founder tick.
Can Cultural Exports Give South Korea a Geopolitical Boost?
Just a few years ago it seemed that China Inc was about to make a big global splash. Starting in 2014 Chinese companies began buying assets across Europe and America, including well-known brands and iconic properties.
When you are dealing with a complex problem, it is usually better to build upon what already works. Any idea that is currently working has passed a lot of tests. Old ideas are a secret weapon because they have already managed to survive in a complex world.
You might have noticed that the smell of grass and rubber cleats can bring back the memory of childhood soccer games in starker detail than watching a home movie of one of those games. Smells have a stronger link to memory and emotion than any of the other senses, and neuroscience may know the reason why.
People think if more money were printed business would be better. This is a false and vicious theory … I am personally very much concerned with the question of inflation and it seems to me there is a grave possibility it will come unless the government at once balances its budget. With an election coming this seems out of the question.
Aren’t there periods when you feel like you’re effortlessly flourishing at work, while other times you feel incompetent and uninspired? You might recognize these periods of concentrated success among your friends, peers, and competitors too.
“The whole idea is to make a rounded person, not an athlete who is great (at running) but when it comes to social skills, dealing with people, they look like monks who are out of touch with society,” he says.
Radical and liberal feminists, as defined by philosophers, differ on the extent to which women’s freely made choices matter. A liberal feminist desires maximum autonomy for women, demanding equal rights and an end to sex discrimination. A radical feminist sees in society patriarchal forces that are bigger than any one person, and which oppress women in part by influencing their choices. Economic differences between the sexes—such as the gender pay gap—are always a sign of injustice.
If you are good at your job, all sorts of push–pull forces within your organization—and society at large—will propel you into bigger roles with more responsibilities, including managing people for the first time or taking on larger teams.
A big part of almost every story in history is that expectations move slower than facts. People become vested in their views of how the world works. But the world can work one way for a long time and then … boom … abruptly lurch in a new direction. Opinions crawl while events leap. It’s a tricky little thing.
There is a lot to things, which we can learn from Japan…
