1. No more of talking politics at work
Today's social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It's become too much. It's a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It's not healthy, it hasn't served us well. And we're done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can't happen where the work happens anymore.
2. Does technology create more jobs than it destroys?
Introducing a robot to the factory floor doesn’t automatically send some number of humans to the unemployment line. It can, and it does, but not always. In fact, so-called labor-destroying technologies can actually preserve and create work. Turns out, in some situations labor-saving tools can actually lead to more work—sometimes due to human meddling, other times due to the new demands of the technology, and often because of both.
More than 60% of jobs performed in 2018 had not yet been invented in 1940, according to a 2020 MIT report that Autor co-authored. Tech-focused roles, like computer engineers, are well-represented among jobs created over this period, but as incomes rose new personal services (e.g., fitness coaching, mental health counseling) emerged as well.
3. How to think?
Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
4. China is the world's great emitter of greenhouse gases; India is not far behind
China’s share of global emissions rose to 27 percent of the world’s total, while the United States remained the second-largest emitter at 11 percent. India’s share came third at 6.6 percent, edging out the 27 nations in the European Union, which accounted for 6.4 percent, the report found.
China, India and other developing nations have long noted that over the past century, the United States and Europe grew their economies while generating massive amounts of greenhouse gases, and that requiring the developing world to clamp down on emissions as they industrialize and bring millions of citizens into the middle class is unfair.
China’s emissions reached 14.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalents in 2019, the Rhodium analysis calculated — more than triple 1990 levels and a 25 percent increase over the past decade. Measuring China’s greenhouse gas emissions on a per capita basis also shows a sharp increase. China is home to more than 1.4 billion people, and its per capita emissions have reached 10.1 tons annually, nearly tripling over the past two decades.
5. The importance of useless knowledge
To become the best possible manager, you should invest time in acquiring ‘useless knowledge’. The type of knowledge that does not directly enhance the bottom line, but enlightens the individual.
To enlarge and sweeten the fruits of management, professionals need to embrace so-called useless knowledge. This knowledge is not the type of information you get from reading the trivialities on Twitter feeds or Facebook. The canon of useless knowledge is more profound and includes philosophy and its continuous questioning of everything, the lessons of history and appreciation of the arts—the humanities of the liberal arts.
The words “useless knowledge” is problematic because it is a contradiction. There is no such thing as useless knowledge. A more suitable term would be indirect knowledge. This type of knowledge that solves problems by introducing new perspectives from outside the world of business. Wielded correctly, understanding the humanities will make you a better manager by understanding new perspectives.
Managers often equate useful with being practical. There is, however, nothing more practical than a good theory. Besides doing something, managers also need to think. The humanities teach you how to think, how to take a new perspective, think about meaning and purpose, without falling into the platitudes of popular management books.
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