Rishad Tobaccowala's Blog, page 10

Driving Changes; 8 Learnings.

1. Change Sucks: While many folks’ prattle on how "change is good" and should be embraced, the reality is that change means doing new and different things and trading in the comfortable, the tried and true and what one knows for months or years of stumbling, inventing things on the fly and looking quite incompetent. Let’s be honest with folks who we would like to help change and acknowledge that it is difficult.But while change does suck, irrelevance is even worse.

2. People are analog: As much as the world is going digital, people remain analog. We have emotion and we make decisions that are not entirely rational. We care about how we are perceived; we love our turf, and we fear uncertainty. Unless one can understand the human needs and concerns when one is looking to deliver change it can get very difficult.

3. Incentives are critical: As Stephen Levy the author of Freakonomics makes clear, to understand someone’s behavior it is critical to understand their incentives. We behave like we are paid to behave. So, whenever anybody wants a key to to drive change, they should start with changing incentives. So many industries continue to reward and provide incentives for the status quo while churning out press releases about change. Change only happens if it makes economic and career sense.

4. Fear must be reduced. Because change is associated with fresh and new things it is also associated with a higher degree of failure. Cultures that penalize failure find themselves ossified to the past. The big difference between Silicon Valley and Japan is their perspectives on failure. In Silicon Valley failure is a badge worn proudly while in Japan it often leads to suicide due to loss of face. There are no second chances in Japan and multiple chances in Silicon Valley. If a company had a high fear level (do people whisper? are folks afraid of the boss?) than the change I recommend to folks is to quit and find a better place.

5. Culture must be paid attention to. Every company has its culture. Some are strong and some weak but often successful companies have very strong cultures. This culture has often been the reason for the company’s success but sometimes may be its weakness in the future. Changing or attacking a company's culture is very intricate and requires both the patience and the precision of a surgeon. Eliminating some key parts of a Company's culture without understanding its importance or role it serves can not only be detrimental to change but also cause the change agent to be tossed out. The best change agents are experts at understanding company cultures.

6. Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant. This advice is from the poet Emily Dickinson. She goes on to say, " the truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind...". Full frontal attacks, hysterical statements about "dead business models" and other melodrama may make good blog copy or conference panel grist but rarely is effective in getting large successful firms to navigate change. The facts must be stated without personal attacks or offering choices that must be made at gunpoint or under fear. Let the facts speak for themselves. Let the reality dawn and rise versus going from darkness to high noon.

7. Bring Data, Facts and Examples. Once a company gets emotionally ready to change, it still needs a lot of facts and examples and here one must be ready to interrogate the company's legacy metrics of success. For instance, most content companies are under the mistaken belief that their content is valuable and can be monetized when the truth is that access to content and new ways of monetizing content is really the future. Data and examples that illustrate this gets the attention of the money folks and the strategic leadership of a firm whose support is key to drive change.

8. Inspirational Leadership is key: At some stage the numbers can be supportive, fear can be reduced, people’s incentives aligned, and the cultural issues addressed but that alone is not enough. At some stage there is a jump into a void that must take place. It is here that the leadership of a company must stand up and inspire. People follow people and not power point.

Davos 2024 = Davos 2017?

Here are my key takeaways from Davos…

The key themes were AI, China showing up in force and worries about it, the breakdown of trust, the need for business transformation, an increasingly polarized world with rising nationalism. These topics and concerns overwhelmed the more recent disruptions caused by the Russian/Ukraine and Middle-East troubles.

If you have been reading summaries of Davos 2024 that just concluded , you probably are familiar with these points.

But here is the zinger…my write-up below was written 7 years ago which was the second last time I was there in person! (Here is the link to the original post.)

This suggests that a) real trends are long lasting , b) change happens much more slowly than the headlines suggest since it takes time for organizations and people to transform and c) all of us should focus more on the signal than be distracted by the noise.

The key drivers remain the same and every one of us should align ourselves and our firms with these underlying challenges and opportunities.

The 2017 Write-Up from Davos.

Over four days there are over 400 sessions on the official World Economic Forum Annual Summit program. In addition, there are a multitude of breakfasts, lunches and dinners with speakers and panels. And then the myriad conversations one shares with some of the 3000 plus delegates. No person can truly summarize the event since one only gets to experience a sliver of what is possible.

Keeping this reality in mind, here are some of the key themes and takeaways from my perspective.

1. Middle Class Driven Populism is and will be the driving force in Western Politics: A combination of a) liberal governments who moved money to the less well to do b) de-regulation and weakening of unions which drove money to owners of capital and c) globalization which moved opportunities to Asian and Southern hemispheres all coming at the time of minuscule economic growth has left the Middle Class in most nations in the West wondering who is on their side? According to the Edelman Trust barometer 53% of people globally do not believe the system is working for them.

Globalization overall has been dramatically good for the world, helping lift a billion people out of poverty, reducing prices, and bringing new opportunities. This is true overall, but for individuals who do not have the right skills or find their job outsourced this is a calamity. As a result, huge swaths of the voting public in the US, UK, France, and other countries are voting against globalization and for national interests first.

The World Economic Forum’s goal is to “improve the state of the world” but individuals do not live in the broad world but in a particular area or country and many things that improve the overall world, hurt countries and localities and it is this oversight that has made people question globalization and the supposedly stateless “Davos Man.”

For the next few years, we can anticipate at best a modified form of globalization where the impact on the middle class and local economies will be the first filter that both politicians and business leaders will be forced to contend with. Donald Trump’s “America First” mantra will be repeated in many other places where elections are held as the middle-class revolt against what they believe is a system rigged against them.

2. Artificial Intelligence (Cognitive Computing) has arrived and will add to the disruption and create a huge need for skill training:

The concept of AI has been around for over 50 years, but it is only now with the advent of deep learning made possible by huge amounts of data, cloud based computing and low-cost storage that pattern, image and voice recognition has reached a point where their capability is growing exponentially.

If you use Google Translate you will find that in the last few months, it has advanced more than it did since it was launched years ago due to AI. From Amazon Echo to Watson Cognitive Computing, AI is the new frontier of technology, and it will drive a huge increase in automation which will impact jobs as much as off shoring did.

This reality caused every AI conversation in Davos to constantly focus on the impact on jobs. IBM’s CEO recently published an internal manifesto on AI which focused on terms such as purpose and transparency and noted her belief that IBM wants to augment versus replace jobs. For instance, IBM Watson today which has been trained on 18 million documents helps doctors make better decisions for Cancer patients because only a machine can imbibe the 8000 new papers being published daily in Oncology.

Major questions arise on AI, where the machine learns on data, as to who trained the machine and what data was used. Just like you and I come out differently depending on what our experiences have been an AI machine will reason differently depending on how it was trained!

Can an AI machine make a blue-collar worker now do white collar work by helping them up-skill? Or will they lose their jobs? Will an AI trained person be a “new collar” worker? Long before driverless cars, it is these reasoning/seeing/speaking computers that all of us will have to be contended with.

Therefore, even after attempting to keeping the immigrants out and putting up barriers to trade, we will find that computing progress will challenge employment and will require a major investment in skill development to keep people working. Education will be critical but a new type of hands-on skill versus four-year college will be required.

3. As the world gets increasingly connected, we are also sometimes getting more disconnected: Today over 3 billion people relate to over 1.5 billion people on Facebook alone. But oddly a combination of people seeking out people like themselves, algorithms that maximize engagement by showing us things we agree with has left us disconnected from ideas, individuals and initiatives that do not “fit” our lives. Thus, we float in our little bubbles, warm in our soapy self-loving embrace, while occasionally flaming and pricking other bubbles that float by which are not aligned with our way of thinking.

This lack of connection and trust was seen in Edelman’s Trust Barometer where trust levels for business, leaders and the media were at all-time lows. People now look to friends and family and people like themselves for news, opinion and expertise. We can make fun of some of our “post-truth” politicians but if we spend our time in our own self-reinforcing chambers are we not also “post-fact” or “post-truth”?

And it is here where I found the folks at Davos were behaving with trepidation and uncertainty. For instance, given the huge concentration of wealth or revenue in a sliver of companies and people (10 percent of the companies drive 80 percent of profits, 8 people have the same wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion, and technology is actually making more wealth go to fewer people with in many tech industries one company taking it all) there was very little real discussion on any painful steps that would be needed to be taken to ensure that those left behind and angry do not explode. No talk of new regulations or laws. No talk of taxes. No talk of re-distribution. Apparently providing training (with no details of even how this was to be done) and some light self-regulation will be enough.

The reason that at Davos there was uncertainty because the folks know that society is changing in ways where an unmitigated quest of globalization, improving the state of the world at the expense of the state of a country and pursuing stockholder return/wealth creation alone, no longer resonates or will be accepted.

It is the reason many companies are leading with the “Responsible and Responsive” focus ensuring that in addition to CSR activities they truly help people’s lives get better. The soft edges of a companies will become competitive edges.

4. China Rises: For the first time at Davos the President of China participated. In a 30-minute talk President Xi built a case for globalization and for being protective of the environment. Without mentioning the US or Donald Trump he worked to show that China was ready to take the mantle of world leader due to its openness and solidity.

In many other panels various Chinese leaders from Jack Ma of Alibaba and more spoke of how they would be enabling jobs, importing goods as they moved to a consumer driven society, focus on soft power through entertainment and much more. There is a clear belief and feeling among the Chinese that this is now their time as EU grapples with its self-identity and Brexit and the US figures out Trump. Disengaging from the world currently is not really an option.

While there are lots of challenges that China itself grapples with from its heated leveraged real estate market, environmental issues, capital/talent flight and the role of the Communist Party, it feels stronger than ever before because maybe the West seems more confused than ever before.

5.Companies are going to have to change their behavior and their structure: Companies are struggling to integrate the short-term reality of markets looking for results and the need to invest for the long term to remain relevant and re-invent themselves. Most CEOs are smart enough to know that they have to find a balance between these two extremes but worry that they are more biased towards the short and rather the long term and therefore are likely seeding their own self-disruption. The markets almost seem to look at established firms as cash cows that they need to milk while moving their grass (green dollars) to newer firms that have been designed for the mobile connected world.

Bain Consulting put out a study noting that in an age of Amazon Web Services and other platforms companies will quickly have to decide are they platform companies? Outsourcings specialists? Product companies? or Service companies? Being all things to all people will no longer work. Focus on one and connect to the others to deliver the solution.

Bain Consulting also re-iterated something everybody in business knows which is that the next generation of talent is not looking to climb a hierarchy but are looking for purpose, impact, experience, and skills and do not want to be managed but inspired.

Finally, speed is a competitive advantage and therefore companies are going to have to be decisive with the yes and no and then decentralized with empowered teams to make things happen.

Organizations and leaders need to re-imagine themselves in this connected age.

Net, we need to go from being controlling, centralized, short term-oriented managers to empowering, federated, long term inspirers.

6. Trust: If there is one overall theme from this Davos it is trust. How to get it? How to keep it? How to regain it?

There has been a breakdown in trust with all four institutions (Government, Business, NGO and the Media) seeing simultaneous declines according to Edelman tracking

Can our politicians be trusted to look after the people who vote for them, or will they look after the people who pay for their campaigns? Will our business leaders think beyond short term profits and global domination and think of the communities they work in and invest in keeping their people relevant and make long term decisions? Can the platforms like Facebook that run black box algorithms and refuse to share their data be trusted with the news and connections and results they show us? Can we really believe that Artificial Intelligence will not come to replace us and the IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, Tencent, Alibaba, Google, Apple and Uber that are driving our future in this area can be trusted with this?

This Davos was clearly one filled with uncertainty and change more than ever before. The themes that I took away (again one person’s perspective based on what I was exposed to) may make one feel pessimistic but we need to keep in mind that the World is better off today than ever before but many people have been left behind and we need to re-think the coming age with inspirational thought, deep feeling and generous sharing of perspectives and the views of different groups as we build an even better future.

7. Implications for Business and Marketing: If there is one theme that business and marketers should focus on is how to be seen as a trusted brand or company. In todays connected world being authentic, purpose driven and transparent is key to gain trust not only among purchasers but also current and potential employees. Thus, companies need to have significant programs externally to ensure they are helping communities, that they are careful about where they source from, that they look at things beyond the bottom line and their Brands are aligned with the greater good. In addition, as employees become the key ambassadors for Brands and the talent wars heat up it will be key to constantly communicate, train, and connect with employees making plans and senior management accessible.

The AI world will impact marketing in a big way. We already saw at CES that Amazon’s Alexa voice operating system was being incorporated into many products and services from Refrigerators to cars. Voice based search will change the way we manage search. And importantly AI bots will augment CRM. These are all scalable today and AI will be a key platform for marketing. At the same time the augmented capability of AI to up-skill and do things faster than humans will require companies to both up-skill their own people and to consider what jobs should be primarily done by machines. The economic competition and price pressures all companies face will not disappear, and AI is one way to increase productivity.

Finally, given the emphasis on data, business really needs to interrogate whether their data programs are as valid and relevant as they can be. Can a company’s data be a bubble of delusion as they frame things through their brand or their category versus what people want and feel in an age of AI are they truly utilizing the correct co-relations and algorithms. Most importantly we often choose with our hearts and then use numbers to justify what we just did. In such a world marketer should never forget the emotion and the feeling that makes us human which often overrides logic and rationale.

Strategic Myopia.

Photography by Linde Waidhofer

Strategy is “Future Competitive Advantage”.

This definition works both at the level of the firm and at the level of the individual.

What will the future look like?

How will the marketplace change with evolving customer needs and expectations?

Who will the competition be not just now but in the future?

Relative to these future needs and competitors what advantage will we or our firms provide?

It is simple way to understand and apply strategy. Here is the process laid out on one page on how every firm and individual can apply strategy including some key questions and approaches: Strategy.

But so many get strategy wrong.

Photography by Linde Waidhofer

Four Strategic Mistakes.

In a piece called Four Strategic Mistakes one set of these mistakes are discussed.

These are:

Mistake 1: Strategies that limit one’s competitive set or category definition by the companies one currently competes with. (Many key opportunities and threats come from outside the way we currently define a competitive set or our categories.)

Mistake 2: Strategies built by extrapolating today’s realities into tomorrow. (Like scale matters or population will keep growing or interest rates will always remain low.)

Mistake 3: Strategies focused on technology trends. (Today it is AI! AI! AI!)

Mistake 4: Strategies that do not incorporate talent dynamics. (People will eat strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.)

More details on these mistakes and how to fix or avoid them are here: Four Strategic Mistakes.

There is however one overwhelming reason that so many companies and individuals really make a mess of strategy.

Photography by Linde Waidhofer

Strategic Myopia!

Strategic myopia is some combination of short-sightedness, long-sightedness or being blind to reality.

Blind to Reality: How many times have we all experiences where our firms or our customers seem to exist in a fairy land disengaged from reality.

Nobody calls out the “turd on the table” because either we do not want to acknowledge the pain that we are on the wrong track or somebody is terrifying or being terrified. Everyone pretends that the brown moist thing in the middle of the table is a brownie when it is a piece of waste.

The problem will solve itself. The issue will dissolve. It is just a short-term hiccup.

But we all know that the issue is real but to confront it means taking on challenges that will be hard to resolve including:

a) we no longer have relevant products or services (AOL as the Internet became more popular.)

b) our marketplace has changed with competitors who have different economics (any traditional media company.)

c) our leaders and even ourselves have outdated skill sets and mindsets. Therefore, unless we learn new things and unlearn old things, we are growing irrelevant (too many senior people especially those who use fear and power to rule.)

Every one of us want to look away and hope we do not have to deal with the challenges. The smart companies and leaders twist themselves into new shapes realizing that transformation is about people.

Short-sightedness: This is a focus on the short term. Results must be delivered this quarter or this year. Either because the urgent crowds out the important, or there are mis-aligned incentives, or short tenures or a focus on the scoreboard of a stock price (even though in reality markets punish companies for not preparing for the future.)

Too many executives align the way they allocate their time with the way they allocate their budgets. Most companies allocate 90% or 95% of their budget on the coming year but that does not mean senior executives should allocate their time that way. The smart ones allocate a quarter of their time to tomorrow, delegating some parts of managing today to their teams. The future cannot be delegated to an innovation group or a futures group (both of which may be important as focal points) but needs a lot of time and commitment of senior management since only they have the expertise to make hard calls, see the patterns and most importantly by doing so signal to the company that the future is important.

Long-sightedness: A form of myopia is long-sightedness which is not being able to see things clearly that are near.

We all have heard the refrains of “this will not happen till I retire”, or “this will happen many years from now so we will worry about it later” only to realize later that 1) change often scales exponentially and what looks like a gradual slope suddenly goes vertical and 2) it takes time for organizations to change (often years) and so waiting is not a form of maximizing strategic options but kicking the ball down the road.

Companies and individuals who wait limit the ability to a) be an early mover and gain competitive advantage with partnerships or pricing and, b) limit the downsides of making mistakes before something has scaled and can truly hurt the organization.

Photography by Linde Waidhofer

Corrective Lenses.

The good news is that strategic myopia can be corrected.

Here are some ways that do not allocate huge budgets or need organizational re-designs.

a) Annual Re-Think: Once a year senior executives should challenge the key assumptions of their strategy. Three key questions to ask are:

Are our customers adding new types of firms or going to other firms for new capabilities?

What are our key competitive advantages that we believe we have and are they truly advantages today or are they anchors that hold us back?

If we were to start our company today with all our assets and no constraints except law and science, given everything we know what would our company look like?

You will be surprised how different the future may look after these exercises.

b) Look outside for inspiration and cautionary tales: Most companies are too focused on their categories and competitors and therefore get defensive if someone says they do not get it or miss that the challenge is not from their existing competitive set. By asking external partners, going on road-trips, and attending conferences to learn with a focus on the following questions:

What are examples of companies that re-invented themselves and created great economic value (Domino’s Pizza, Microsoft, Abercrombie and Fitch, New York Times) and what can we learn from them.

What companies tried to re-invent themselves and failed and why?

What companies failed to change and dwindled away (many newspapers and other print media companies, Blackberry.)

Great strategies are often only seen at a distance (away from one’s category) just like great architecture can only be often appreciated from a distance.

Strategy will grow more and more important as the rate of change and transformation speeds up.

To thrive one must understand strategy, avoid common mistakes and most importantly not be myopic.

Learnings: Life.

Life is a journey through reality and time in search of meaning and joy.

Life.

Life is defined by change, chance, and choice.

Every day we change and the world around us changes.

Much of what happens is life is due to chance. The people we meet. The timing of things. Whom we are born to and where we are born.

Amidst the change and chance, it is the choices we make that determines the quality and substance of a life.

Journey.     

The journey we take is in part the journey we make.

Roads diverge and much is determined by which we travel by.

Often, we trip and fall, or we end up at dead ends.

To go on we repair.

We re-imagine.

We practice resurrection.

Reality.

While life without imagination is impoverished and small, we cannot escape reality.

Science matters. Gravity does not care if we believe in it or tweet otherwise.

Facts are stubborn things. Data has a way of breaking in. Karma strikes back.

Darwin was right.

The drums of reality beat in the marrow of our blood.

Let us bring imagination to it but aligning with reality is key to a fulfilling life.

Time.

Time is the only asset.

The meaning of life is that it ends.

Life is often about making memories and focusing on what matters most.

Because what is here today will be gone tomorrow.

Extracting the extra-ordinary from the ordinary and finding poetry in every crevice gives grace to a day.

Meaning.

Meaning is often a combination of identity, connection, and mission / purpose.

Identity is about who we are, what we do and how we fit in our skin.

To be okay with solitude if necessary.

To march to a beat of our own rhythm. To listen and learn from others but not to live in other people’s minds or always be needing their validation.

To both be seen but not be defined by how one is seen.

Connection is key for while we may each be unique and sometimes crave solitude, humans have thrived through belonging and connectedness. Being part of groups, causes, families, cultures, and tribes.

Much of the gusto of life and the go of it comes from mission and purpose. Causes bigger than us and outside us. People to nurture and care for. Goals to be achieved. Things to be built. Work to be created. Spirituality.

Joy.

Success is having the freedom to spend time in the ways that give one joy.

Joy is deeper and broader than and often can exist in the absence of happiness.

Joyous people often combine gratitude, generosity, humility, and learning with a deep sense of connectedness and awareness.

Life is a journey through reality and time in search of meaning and joy.

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

Mind-Shi(f)t.

Mid-Journey 6.0

“When the facts change, I change my mind-what do you do sir”

- Attributed to John Maynard Keynes

“My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.”

- Mahatma Gandhi

“A sign of intellect is the ability to change your mind in the face of new facts. A mark of wisdom is refusing to let the fear of admitting you were wrong stop you from getting it right. The joy of learning something new eventually exceeds the pain of unlearning something old.”

- Adam Grant

A combination of four shifts 1) technological shifts driven by the twin and inter connected forces of AI and Bio-technology, 2) demographic shifts of declining populations ( outside of Africa), and aging populations, 3) power shifts from scale to small (outside of a few cases), management to labor and west to east and 4) boundary shifts in a world where work has become distributed and media and customer behavior have become omni-channel and funnel fusing, individuals and businesses who can shape shift are likely to succeed.

The challenge we will all face is to a) be open to other points of view, b) to be informed by facts, data, reality, and trusted sources and c) how to emphasize quality over quantity, complexity versus caricature and nuance over screed.

These challenges are being turbo-charged by AI, social media like Tik-Tok which is the source for “news” for under 34 year olds, and algorithms optimized to re-enforce our viewpoints and perspectives.

All of this further accelerated by the heat of a 2024 election season in a polarized landscape.

How can we be open to mind-shifts if we are on the receiving end of rivers of mind-shit?

How to to have the wisdom and the calm of the sage and not find our-selves locked into cages of rage?

It is the failure to change our minds and our way of being that lead to defeat.

Self-Defeat.

A case can be made that most successful individuals, institutions and nations are rarely defeated by others but find ways to defeat or weaken themselves to enable their own withering and dissolving.

In almost every case the same four indicators have been flashing for a while, but no one was paying attention.

The four symptoms of SDD (Self-Defeating Disease) are:

Incestuous thinking: A smaller and smaller group of decision makers with similar backgrounds and long tenure in the same place.

 Cult replacing Culture: A cult either around a leader, a “way”, a fashionable financial market meme (“everything as a service”, “data driven everything”, “streaming is the only way”, or some other weird dogmas parroted and echoed by a fawning press chasing page views, trending stories and personalities).

Fear:  Fear of speaking up, fear of change, fear of opposing the leader or “the way”!

Overreach: Letting recent success and fawning make one lose perspective that much success is driven by luck and trends that can turn and therefore overreaching too far or moving too soon. They tend to defeat them-selves though some combination of complacency, over-reach and haughtiness.

Surrounded by supplicants, sycophants, synchronous thinkers with handlers, gate-keepers, people who powder puff their noses they often have a belief it is they versus the position they inhabit is the source of power.

They are incapable of mind-shifts.

How to ensure Mind-Shift.

Diversity of Thinking: Diversity of backgrounds and thinking particularly in leadership teams are critical. If everybody thinks the same way, it can be dangerous. Disagreement and challenging points of view is what boards, external perspectives and independently successful people bring to a company or to a person.

Building a case for the opposite: Whenever a key decision needs to be made a team or individual should be charged with building a case for the exact opposite of what you as an individual, a leader or board are considering. This provides two benefits. First it allows one to make sure that group think does not disconnect us from reality since there is a reminder that we may be wrong. Second it helps us correct gaps in the thinking of our original recommendation. It is like stress testing our proposition.

A blank piece of paper approach: Many times, individuals and companies find themselves in self-defeating positions because of a way of doing, a historic momentum, legacy costs, or structures and fixating on current category dynamics. What if one was to launch a company or initiative with a blank sheet of paper with only three constraints. A legal one (whatever one does has to be legal), technological (it must be possible today) and economic (some breakeven or other financial constraint) what would one do to anticipate or meet a customer need?

The future comes from the slime and not the heavens: There are many benefits of being a leader, working at a very successful company and being on the top of the world. Everybody wants to meet with you or think you are cool because of the fame and reputation of your company. The press fawns and friends’ gush. It gives us all a great rush. Important that we do not get too high on our fumes and begin to believe our flatulence smells like Chanel 5.

Pay attention to those who may not have title and those over whom you might not have power but who bring thoughts that startle, question and provoke a certain uneasiness.

Gifts.

This holiday season and as the year ends and a new one begins here are gifts we can give others and ourselves that are of high value but cost nothing monetarily.

Joy. Appreciation. Kindness.

Joy

A definition of success is the freedom to spend time in ways that gives one joy.

Joy is more than happiness which is often transitory as it ebbs and flows with external events.

“Joy is a flash of eternity that illuminates time”

The joy that comes with deep satisfaction and contentment however endures and its contours do not waver with the oscillations of the transient.

From Vacillations by W. B. Yeats:

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

Experience, time, and observation reveals there are ways to architect joy.

To be free to use your time to pay attention to what matters and what matters to you.

Or as the late David Foster Wallace said in his mind shifting talk This is Water:

“The important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

The ordinary becomes extra-ordinary when we pay attention, and we find poetry in the crevices of every day.

“We love life if we find a way to it…”

Appreciation

Among the teachings of the Stoics is the ephemeral nature of life and the passing of time.

As the years go by we find “each year harder to live within…each year harder to live without”

The followers of Wabi-Sabi in the Orient recognize the impermanence, imperfection, and incompleteness of all things.

The Poet Kate Ryan writes of the “joy of finding lost things”

And Carly Simon in “Anticipation” sings that she will stay right here because these are the good old days.

From all these individuals one learns three mental exercises to appreciate what we have:

Imagine a thing you own or a person or place you appreciate lost.

All of us have lost things and sometimes re-found them.

Often not.

A set of keys, a wallet, a passport.

Sometimes a child in a crowd and sometimes a friend after an argument who we make up with.

Other times it is our health or a home or a job.

When we lose something, we often feel more pain in its absence than the joy we had in its presence.

Whenever we have the opportunity to recover it, we appreciate it more than ever before.

An exercise from the Stoics is to imagine you have lost something to appreciate what one has.

As the line goes “we do not know what we have until we have lost it”

Imagine that you were doing something for the last time.

What makes the ordinary and every day extra-ordinary is that one day it will not be so.

There will be a last day a child will crawl. A last day you will see someone. A last day you will visit a place or drive a car or go to a restaurant. Sometimes we know the last times and often we do not. When we are aware of the last times, we have a higher sense of attention and a sensitivity to the specialness and the passing of the moment.

But these last times come every week and sometimes every day.

Imagine that the life you lead is the life that millions aspire to as you aspire to some other life.

We sometimes define our happiness by our advancement toward the things we do not have versus the things we do have.

Most people living in the Western World or Upper and Upper Middle Classes of most countries who also have their health are living the life that billions aspire to.

The life we have got used to is the aspiration for most people.

We are living the dream life for many as we dream of living some other life.

We may wish to celebrate every new day as a day of thanks and gratitude.

Kindness

One of the keys to a good life and possibly success at work is kindness.

This includes not just being kind to other people but kind to oneself.

Often we spend our time regretting, self-flagellating, doubting our decisions and wondering if we can ever measure up especially in a world filled with standards and measures that are unattainable.

In today’s competitive marketplace of rapidly transforming landscapes and constant benchmarking we often forget that we are dealing not just with buyers, sellers, users, members, competitors, analysts, scientists, management and employees but with analog, carbon based, feeling filled people.

Humans.

Messy and Moody. Dream filled and desire driven.. Anxiously ambitious. Undulating with uncertainty.

Kindness is a way to connect in a world where connections are key.

George Saunders the writer in a convocation speech said:

“When young, we’re anxious — understandably — to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you — in particular you, of this generation — may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can . . .

And this is actually O.K. If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously — as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.

Still, accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.”

All the best to you readers for the days ahead…

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

AI is Under-Hyped.

Image by GPT-4

The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.

Bill Gates

My sense is that AI will have far greater impact than the microprocessor, the PC, the Internet and the mobile phone. It will have the impact of the printing press, electricity, the automobile, the telephone, television/radio and vaccinations which were far more impactful in changing every aspect of society than information technology.

There are many who believe AI is hype and just a new form of advanced statistics turbocharged by the data available on the Internet, new algorithms and increasingly powerful processors from Nvidia and others.

To keep up to date on this thinking do bookmark and read the AI Hype Wall of Shame below.

The AI Hype Wall of Shame

Here is why I think otherwise:

Image by GPT-4

1. The keys are in place for AI to truly combustOxygen, heat, and fuel are frequently referred to as the "fire triangle." Add in the fourth element, the chemical reaction, and you actually have a fire "tetrahedron."

Fuel = Money. Scott Galloway has written about how he believes that Money rather than Taylor Swift should have been Time’s Person of the Year and there is no doubt that money is overwhelming everything from sports to politics. The largest single tsunami of money movement is to AI both within the worlds of Private Equity and Venture Capital but also within the investment allocations of companies everywhere in the world. Between December 10 and 16 the center of the AI world was not in SF but in New Orleans at NeurIPS 2023 where tens of thousands of people from all over the world including big booths from financial firms like Citadel to major money players from China.

Oxygen= Free. We have seen the marginal cost of compute on a plunge to zero, the marginal cost of distribution due to internet plunge to zero and now we are going to see the cost of knowledge plunge to zero. Massive compute and storage power in the Cloud, world wide access and distribution and global knowledge that is free as open source systems from Mistral and Meta now 4 to 5 months behind the best closed systems from OpenAI (an inappropriate name for a non transparent company filled with intrigue and soap opera ) catch up with far cheaper and faster tech that require less compute and will run on a laptop!

Heat= Disarray. The bankruptcy of old models built for 1945. Here from the New York Times is an extract from an article on something as central as the global financial system:

“Nearly 80 years later, the global financial architecture is outdated, dysfunctional and unjust,” António Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, said this summer at a summit in Paris. “Even the most fundamental goals on hunger and poverty have gone into reverse after decades of progress.”

The world today is geopolitically fragmented. More than three-quarters of the current I.M.F. and World Bank countries were not at Bretton Woods. China’s economy, in ruins at the end of World War II, is now the world’s second-largest, an engine of global growth and a crucial hub in the world’s industrial machine and supply chain. India, then still a British colony, is one of the top five economies in the world.

Can governments grappled with internal dissensions and the external shifts of a multi-polar regulate a global, exponentially scaling in power, rapidly declining in cost super force soon available to all ?

Image by GPT-4

2. Every knowledge workers job in the developed world and probably in the developing world will be significantly impacted in less than a thousand days.

We are in world where the cost of knowledge is tending towards zero, where the cost of content creation is being dramatically reduced, where the time spent in collecting, collating, organizing and presenting information is being reduced by 50% to 80% and most managerial tasks of allocating, delegating, monitoring and measuring will be done ruthlessly faster with fewer mistakes by AI than what exactly is a knowledge workers job?

If you were impressed by prompt to text and prompt to image now consider Idea to Video via Pika .

A recent Boston Consulting Group study shows the impact of today’s generative ai technology (which will be exponentially better and cheaper next year) including how these technologies enable a flattening of skills.

Most knowledge firms like law to consulting to marketing basically have a system where they charge by the hour.

Now consider that AI a) dramatically reduces the number of hours, b) lessens the need for lower level associates who often did collection, collation, compilation, and co-ordination work done by AI ( and these are the most profitable to a service company since the difference between what they are paid and billed is widest in these firms and c) and allows mid level performers who may be paid much less than the most senior executives to operate close to their level of competence.

Now imagine the impact on jobs in a future where one must bill less time with lower margin and fewer senior people?

No need to imagine. McKinsey has shrunk its new partner class by 35% from 380 people last year to 250 this year. And Ernst and Young has cut 10% of all of its consulting partners. While these are about today’s challenges these firms are smart enough to anticipate tomorrow. ( For the near term AI has been a boon to consulting and other firms but this is the first time what they are consulting about is also likely to revolutionize their business.)

In the media industry of publishing and news already 20,000 jobs have been cut as changes by tech platform from down playing content and news to re-jiggering where they send traffic.

And the impact of AI is yet to be felt

Now imagine a television show where AI creates and powers all the content and is the Talent.

No need to imagine try out Channel 1…

Now imagine you were a translator or a company selling language lessons.

Well Eleven Labs is the first of many that will allow for real time free translation and dubbing of any content in any language or accent for close to free…

And however impressed or unimpressed you are by the above examples its nothing compared to what we will see in a few weeks ( not months or years).

Image by GPT-4

3. The Four Big Horsemen of GDP are in for an exciting ride!

In the US nearly half of GDP is concentrated in the Health, Auto, Finance and Education industries all of which are going to have amazing opportunities along with rapid changes brought about by AI which will require strong leaders to navigate.

Health: Google’s DeepMind has had major breakthroughs in protein folding which will be revolutionary in developing new cures but also is being leveraged to enhance clinical trials, interpret images and provide much more reliable and faster diagnosis.

Education: When knowledge is free and the future of all industries changing rapidly the world of education is or should be asking itself some existential questions such as What should we be teaching? Maybe in a world where allocating, delegating, monitoring and measuring will be replaced by creating, building, making and guiding, education should go back to school on what is education and how to focus less on knowledge but more on insight, wisdom, communications and creativity. Another question is since AI is going to be so disruptive to so many industries should education now focus on re-skilling and up-skilling all career long versus a focus on pre-career training?

Finance: Finance is a unique combination of math and emotion (greed/fear). AI is changing the math dramatically. Let us look at insurance which is an underwriting and claims processing business often based on actuarial tables and deep droves of data including weather patterns and sensors on cars among other objects. All the big Insurance companies are deeply investing in AI to better manage and price risk. Intriguingly AI will reduce risk and liability if cars are safer but increase liabilities if AI drives massive positive health outcomes and people live longer meaning that a lot of insurance and annuities that are sold today may be underpriced!

Auto: It is not just electric cars but all modern cars are increasingly computing engines on wheels and AI has been used for design, engineering and more. Just as we saw the rise of Chinese Auto due to the electric shift, AI be a big driver in auto. A large part of Tesla’s market capitalization is that it is one of the premier AI companies at heart.

Image by GPT-4

4. AI will create great disruption but with proper leadership can be a massive net positive for the next chapter of humanity.

Every major advance from printing press to automobiles to electricity has created great disruptions and significant loss of jobs and the need for new ways of governing and thinking but have in time been hugely positive in a multitude of ways furthering humanity.

While AI will need to be governed it will be hard to slow or stop or control due to its global nature, its exponential and rapid advancement along with the current constraints of government.

While many worry about rogue AI ending the world it is far more likely to enable a better world with amazing empowerment of individuals, catalyze tens of millions of new businesses, provide new opportunities for emerging and smaller countries, allow for a significant extension in healthier lives and much more.

The rate of how fast these changes will occur is not being understood as every firm follows a 3 E strategy of embedding, enhancing and extending their existing products and services with AI as Microsoft has done with Co-pilot or Google with Bard scaling and making available the technology to hundreds of millions of users in a matter of weeks!

The shift from the current to the new world will likely be chaotic and for individuals and institutions to remain relevant in an AI age it will be key to embrace AI, adapt yourself and your business to AI and complement AI.

This will be a time calling for great leaders, continuous learning and open imaginations.

All moving forward with great urgency…

Poetry.

“Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.”

―Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.”

―Joan Didion

Poetry is a form of “accelerated thinking”. Poems combine depth of feeling, clarity of thought and the power of imagery in a mystical combination that rises to another level of communication. They sit at the edge where reality and imagination interact.

Books of poetry are the books that are like the “axe for the frozen sea within us” which Franz Kafka believed we needed. And any of one of the poetry anthologies by Edward Hirsch (above) will open a world that will make you see your world differently.

A poem beats out time.

Poetry is a soul making activity.

It sacramentalizes experience. And it gives us courage to speak up so that:

“Where the voice that is in us makes a true response, where the voice that is great within us rises up”

And poems reminds us of the passing of time…

Time is an echo of an axe within a wood

The sunlight in the garden hardens and grows cold, we cannot cage the minute within its net of Gold

One of my favorite poems about the passing of time is called “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon and reminds us to appreciate every day because one day it will be otherwise

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.

All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

Whenever you believe you have someone figured out or wonder why you cannot figure yourself or why things are always changing these lines from Ars Poetica? by Czelaw Milosz might be of help:

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person,  for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,  and invisible guests come in and out at will.”

Or Rabindranath Tagore’s Last Poems (#13)

Poems help us “see” differently.

Here are some lines by James Wright’s book “ The Branch will not Break” which all describe dusk in a midwest prairie farm. Each line is filled with a new way of seeing and whenever I am driving in the evenings outside of Chicago I sense things differently because of these lines. The sensing and seeing also helps me in my writing, my photography and in paying attention…

Silos creep away toward the West

The cow bells follow one another into the distances of the afternoon

The sun floats down, a small golden lemon dissolves in the water

The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field. The dark wheat listens.

Of all the books of Poetry I have my favorite remains the first book I bought forty five years ago which you can see through its wear and tear and is the one I would recommend to anyone wanting to discover the beauty of Poetry. Start with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Dylan Thomas . It was published first in 1952. Its author died in 1964. You can still get it on online and and in most book stores…

Four Strategic Mistakes.

What is strategy?

Strategy is Future Competitive Advantage.

What will the future look like? What will people need and expect? How will demographics, technology and other global shifts create new competitors or recharge current competitors and how will categories blur, blend and maybe even disappear?

Amidst these new expectations and changing competitive dynamics what advantage will your company offer? A differentiated or better product? A competitive moat of network effects, scale or some other dynamic? A better experience? Speed and value?

When companies get strategies wrong they tend to make on or more of the following four mistakes:

Mistake 1: Strategies that limit ones competitive set or define categories by the companies one currently competes with.

Many companies do not get strategy right primarily because they do not understand the exponential impact of technology and make the cardinal mistake of defining their category and competitive set looking backward versus forward.

One example among many is the auto category which defined the key drivers of their category in ways that did not see a Tesla or an Uber for years after they began to scale. How could software be as, if not more, important than hardware? How could electric be better than internal combustion engines? Do most people need the expenses of owning cars or do they just need on demand mobility?

Now just when electric appears to be the future companies like Toyota are striking back with a “both” versus “either gas or electric” strategy with hybrids that are starting to outsell pure electric options.

Look where there is transformation in a category and the instigator is usually from outside the category or a sudden renaissance from an incumbent that everybody believes has been left behind because they start to think differently like Toyota did or as Domino’s did in re-imagining pizza delivery.

This insular or present/ backward focussed bias happens for many reasons including the innovators dilemma of companies not wanting to disrupt themselves, leadership teams hoping that they will retire before the next tsunami hits and incentive plans built to maximize today despite the entire companies future being tomorrow.

A company’s greatest opportunities and threats usually come from outside its category.

If a strategy is based only on existing competitors and todays category definitions, it may be dead on arrival.

Mistake 2: Strategies built by extrapolating todays realities into tomorrow.

Many strategies were developed or continue to be developed assuming what has been true for over a decade will remain true.

a)  Expanding and aging populations: When calculating “Total addressable market” or “rate of growth” most companies factored in growing populations.

Now the exact reverse is beginning to happen. Populations have started to decline in most advanced economies at a frightening rate.

It takes 2.1 children per mother to keep the population the same. The average across most developed countries is 1.7 and it is 1.1 in China. For the first time in the US the number has fallen below 2.1 and the population has declined this past year.

With low or no immigration, the US population according to the US census has peaked and only with high immigration will the country pass the 400 million mark. With no immigration the population will fall by one third in the next 50 years from 335 million to 226 million.

And populations are not just declining but aging fast. 10,000 people turn 65 every day in the US. By 2030 one of out of every five Americans or 20% of the US will be over 65 almost double the proportion from 2010.

With more people growing older and over half the wealth in most countries held by those over 60 every company should not just fixate on Gen Alpha and Gen Z but the other end of the age spectrum !

b) Scale is a competitive advantage: One of the long-standing tenets of business are the advantages of scale.

Scale has provided companies with many benefits from higher margins due to lower costs, to insulation from competition due to moats of marketing spending and widespread distribution.

Over the past decade however the benefits of scale have diminished and in some cases are proving to be a disadvantage:

Scale of Distribution: With direct-to-consumer marketing enabled by the Internet and platforms like Shopify, widespread retail distribution is no longer as effective an advantage. Clearly distribution matters but there are ways to route around the big stores by going direct and creating demand that forces buyers to stock your product.

Scale of Communication: New media behaviors by people particularly search and social are leading to communication channels where spending power is no longer a competitive edge as it was in television or print where marketers cornered key inventory at advantageous prices. Platforms like Facebook enable millions of small businesses with personalization and targeting capabilities to discover customers and be discovered. As content supported by advertising declines to less than a third from nearly two thirds the scale of spending while still being important is losing its potency.

Scale of Manufacturing: The “Everything as a service” platforms from Amazon Web Services to Foxconn allow smaller companies to gain the edges of scaled manufacturing, distribution, and technology without any of the legacy disadvantages of size.

Scale of People: From IBM to GE to Unilever to Walmart there are hundreds of thousands of employees and therefore ability to recruit and grow a range of talent and offer career advancement. Scale of people continue to be important to execute complex and large tasks but there are also new ways to re-aggregate talent. And a generation of talent wants to work in smaller and more entrepreneurial environments. In the post Covid world as we move to unbundled workplaces there will be far more ways to build teams both globally and in real time than ever before.

Legacy scale still matters in most industries and is critical in quite a few like semi-conductors. In fabricating advanced chips, a new fabrication plant can cost over 4 billion dollars and there is no way around scale. Today TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) dominates due to its scale.

However, while we can never underestimate legacy scale, there are new forms of scale that every smart company recognizes and is expanding into such as the scale of networks, scale of data, scale of influence and scale of talent and ideas.

c)  Capital and talent are in abundant supply: As the world has moved away from a Zero Interest Rate Policy regime the past decade of  easy access to capital is shredding so many strategies that were built on low to no cost of capital.

The bigger long term shift is the shift of power and options to talent and labor away from capital and management in many developed markets.

The first factor is simply demand and supply dynamics are changing as populations in these countries decline and age and immigration is limited as the chart below shows.

Then one has changing mindsets of talent whether it be Gen-Z questioning the current workplace or post Covid-19 mindsets where all our minds are like champagne corks in that they have swelled and no longer fit back into the world that management desperately hopes to will back.

And then there is a huge surge in talent looking to maximize their optionality with 66 percent of Gen-Z who have a full time job also having a side hustle or gig for additional compensation and building an off ramp into a new career. In the US 76 percent of Gen-Z want to work for themselves with the number in East Asia now higher than 80%?

This combination of low unemployment, new mindsets among white collar workers and a significant increase in Union power has stunned boards to such an extent that after AI, companies most frequently call out Unions and Talent as key areas of impact in earning calls.

The future vectors of change will not be built around the forces of the past

Mistake 3: Strategies focused on technology trends.

Every board loves a deck with Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoints panting excitedly on every page about the buzzword bingo of the moment.

It used to be personalization, platforms, data lakes and disruption.

Then it was Web3, Direct to Consumer, Metaverse, Blockchain.

Now it is AI here, AI there and AI everywhere!

While AI is expected to be even more transformational than the Web and the iPhone combined and will change the contours of business and life, it is highly unlikely AI itself will be a differentiator to a majority of companies.

In fact it is likely to be a commodity like data.

Both are like electricity.

No company will be able to compete without significant data and AI investments but it highly unlikely that it will be the data and the AI that will be the differentiator.

The future of AI in a company will be about how it is used not to replace but to turbocharge HI ( Human Inspiration). And CFO’s who believe AI will replace people and generate savings should also keep in mind that world class talent with AI and a clean sheet of paper might also replace many existing companies! (Thus leaving the cost cutting CFO without a job!)

In fact the real good CFO’s are investing, learning and starting to leverage AI to turbocharge growth versus only guillotining costs! (Without a doubt anything that a machine can do better will be done by a machine and so there will be savings and elimination of many tasks).

Technology including AI should be an input to strategy rather than writing strategies around technology !

Mistake 4 : Strategies that do not incorporate talent dynamics.

Unless talent in an organization is aligned and trained with the new strategy and therefore their behaviors are transformed, the company will not transform and the strategy will not be any real than the posters, t-shirt, and coffee cups that they are embossed on.

After the strategy document, the M&A plan, and the re-organization (all of which are important) nothing gets done unless the messy issue of people are dealt with and therefore talent dynamics should be a key part of strategy planning.

Specifically:

Why is the strategy good for the employees ? Why is it good for their personal future competitive advantage? ( Telling talent things like it is good for the company or if they do not change they will lose their jobs has zero motivational power or impact).

How will incentive plans be changed to align future behaviors with the new strategy? (To understand behavior of talent and management follow incentive plans not strategy)

What is the training and growth development plan? (Any strategy which does not invest in training and upgrading people to align with the new direction or strategy is purely delusion)

And this will remain true in the AI age where while every job will change and many white collar jobs (unlike in previous technology shifts where blue collar jobs were impacted) may be eradicated talent will still be key.

History has shown that very advance in technology places a premium on superior ability.

Today there are marvelous breakthroughs in AI technology from Open AI, Anthropic, Adobe, Google, Meta among the big firms and companies like Runway ML, Pika Art, Eleven Labs, and hundreds of others.

They are all awe inspiring and jaw dropping technologies that are advancing at rapid speed.

But remember the typewriter did not write “A Farewell to Arms” but Hemingway did.

If I had a word processor and ChatGPT and Hemingway has a pen he would write better.

If Hemingway also had ChatGPT the distance between us would be even wider.

Hemingway with a Substack would have scaled amazingly better than most.

It is not the technology; it is the talent.

Talent has scaled globally using technology like a lever.

So, we should worry less about how AI will replace talent but how we will leverage AI to scale ourselves, our teams and companies.

Growing, leading, attracting, retaining, and investing in talent is going to be a key strategic advantage.

Every human and individual and employee with the right support and placement can be highly productive and valuable.

Every strategy deck should have a significant section on how to turbocharge and build the strategy leveraging talent and not just focus on competitive dynamics, financial metrics and total addressable market and other data.

Companies grow and transform when talent grows and transforms.

Wide Spectrum Reading.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”

― Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragon

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

Life without reading and books would be a mistake.

In many ways the fastest way to learn, the best way to empathize with others, to grow and challenge oneself and to fuel ones thinking and ability to communicate is to read.

If our bodies are in part what we eat our minds and spirit is in large part what we read.

If innovation is connecting dots in new ways and ideas are fueled by insights then both of these are often turbocharged by reading.

But in a world with so much to do, filled with so many books and so little time how can we read deeply and widely?

I read forty to sixty books every year spanning fiction and non-fiction, graphic novels and children books, anthologies and literary periodicals, allocating an hour or two a day to the task.

This is in addition to the newspapers, magazines, email newsletters , blogs, and Substack’s that keep me informed but I have found they are not sufficient miss a to truly understand, grow and thrive.

Most people do not have the luxury of such time but if you have 20 to 25 minutes a day ( an hour and a half a week ) here is a recommendation of 7 resources that will provide you with the greatest range of world class writing in English from all over the globe every year. They are all available both in paper form which is my preference but also in digital form and a few as audible books.

I have read each of them for over two decades and they form the foundation of my yearly reading and are probably the best return on time spent every year.

The Best American Series.

The Best American Series consist of six annual anthologies guest edited by a different person each year. The three I recommend are the essay, short stories and science anthologies ( Was also a big fan of the travel writing anthology whose publication was discontinued in 2022 ).

The essays introduce you to distinct voices. This year’s foreword by the outgoing long time series editor on censorship and freedom of speech is in itself worth the price of the book.

If “art is the lie that tells the truth” than the short stories are compressed truth.

Science and Nature are far broader and deeper than AI and Climate change as the Science and Nature compilation reveals.

Each book contains about 20 pieces that take about 20 minutes each to read and are sourced from hundreds of periodicals. They span a diverse spectrum perspectives, and points of view. Each year at least a dozen of these sixty impact the way I think or live and you might find them similarly meaningful.

These are available globally in print, electronically and as audio books. The print editions are $17 in the US and less than 400 rupees ( $5 )each in India.

Pushcart Prize Anthologies

If you read only one book a year this is the one you should read.

It sources its material from smaller and off beat periodicals ( no New Yorker or Paris Review or Atlantic Magazines) and contains fiction, non-fiction, essays and poetry many of which will have the impact of being slapped by a cold fish on your face ( in a nice way).

The range of writers and voices are ones you do not often come across including the inner life of influencers, the drama of being a gamer and perspectives of people you never knew existed.

No gloss, no floss, no boss.

Just amazing writing filled with passion using and twisting language into lines that will transform you.

This is a big book running hundreds of pages and dipping in and out over the year is the best way to approach it.

The Paris Review and Granta.

The Paris Review and Granta are quarterly periodicals that are unique and very different from each other. While both publish fiction, non-fiction, photography and art they are complementary in many ways.

The Paris Review has a unique series called “ The Art of…” which are interviews carried out over months with two different artists each quarter on how they create their art. These include fiction writers, dramatists, poets, journalists, biographers, film makers and much more. Paris Review also has a number of free digital newsletters including a poem of the day.

Granta reads younger and more global and usually focusses on a theme or region. One quarter the entire series will be about brothers and sisters. The latest issue will be about Deutschland (Germany). Based on this theme one can read a spectrum of writing and look at photographs, collages and much more. Granta also has a tilt to travel and exploration relative to the Paris Review.

Both can be accessed digitally and/or in print. (No audible version).

You can learn more about the Paris Review here: https://www.theparisreview.org/

And about Granta here: https://granta.com/

The New York Review of Books.

The New York Review of Books is published 24 times a year and is really a magazine of ideas that use writers and books as as starting point to cover politics, economics, society, film, music and art.

An example the issue above has a wonderful essay by Natalie Anger called “ Not Milk?”on why we do not need milk and how milk is one of the most successful marketed products. There is a take down of private equity with data that will blow you away and two pieces “ How Germans See Jews Today” and “Tragedy on the West Bank” which provide great nuance, depth, perspective, humanity and wisdom on the tragedy unfolding in the Middle East.

These seven suggestions of four books and three annual subscriptions will set you back about 15 dollars a month ( or two beers during happy hour )and any one of these or all of them can make a great gift to yourself, your loved ones or your colleagues.

They are available globally and while published in the US or UK they source writers from all over the world. The limitations are that they focus primarily on the English language and that means the spectrum is not as wide or all encompassing as it could be but still it is a pretty wide aperture.

Feel free to add your favorite books or recommendations in the comments.