Phone Vs. Zoom
Every month, High Lantern Group gathers a small list of interesting, provocative, and contrarian items that shed light on what makes great strategic positioning and thought leadership. We are happy to share them with you - and hear from you about ideas worth sharing.
Six Ideas That Made Us Think
1. Is Japan Back?
This month, after decades of recession and negative growth, Japan’s flagship stock index reattained its peak from 1989. Noah Smith assesses the comeback – and points out Japan still has a broken corporate culture:
Traditionally, Japanese companies prize hours of work input over actual results, and this needs to change. Right now, Japanese offices are open-plan affairs where everyone sits there trying to look busy. It’s no coincidence that Japan’s white-collar productivity is some of the lowest in the developed world. Cubicles would help, but letting workers take some of their work home with them would do far more. At home, the goal of work is not to look busy, but to accomplish a specific task, in order to please your boss on the following day.
2. Memo to the Fed: Shut Up
Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw believes that Federal Reserve chairman Jay Powell regularly breaks an elementary rule of communication: Powell uses many words to convey few ideas. Mankiw elaborates:
It is almost as if the news conference should come with a disclaimer: "I do not intend to say anything interesting. If you think I have said something interesting, please ignore because I misspoke.”
3. China’s Electric Vehicle Glut
China’s state-controlled industrial policy for EV’s has created a chronic affliction: overcapacity. Yanmei Xie, writing in The Financial Times, explores how China’s feverish pursuit of the EV industry has created a bloated market:
In 2014 alone, more than 80,000 companies registered in China to enter the EV sector, more than doubling the previous year’s number of new registrants. The strategic emerging industry appeared to be a textbook cautionary tale of waste, corruption, overcapacity, vicious price wars and low profitability.
Xie notes an important concession: even though China’s industrial policy can be staggeringly wasteful, it may also produce stunning results. China leads the world in global EV sales.
4. It Doesn’t Add Up
Travis Meier, the Opinions Editor at The Washington Post, takes aim at a favorite sacred cow: high school math. “Prioritizing higher-level numeracy over other forms of logical reasoning is not turning us into a nation of engineers and physicists…It’s letting us become a nation that can’t think straight.” He elaborates:
Only 22 percent of the nation’s workers use any math more advanced than fractions, and they typically occupy technical or skilled positions. That means more than three-fourths of the population spends painful years in school futzing with numbers when they could be learning something more useful.
5. I Won’t Grow Up
The “Disney adult” is far more than a weird cultural embarrassment that attracts gawkers on social media, insists Ameilia Tait. It is a consequence of Mickey Mouse’s carefully groomed strategy:
In the popular imagination, a Disney adult is a childless, self-infantilised and overly excitable millennial; someone who lacks both self- and social awareness...What is missing from endless comment sections is the fact that they are a creation of the Walt Disney Company – a character constructed just as carefully as Elsa or Donald Duck. Disney does not hide its desire to create lifelong consumers.
6. Phone Vs. Zoom
On the podcast EconTalk, host Russ Roberts and Charles Duhigg, author of Supercommunicators, discuss how conversations on the phone differ from those on Zoom. Duhigg reveals an amazing aspect of one of NPR’s most popular interview programs:
When you go on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, even if you're in Philadelphia, even if you're in the same studio as her, she will insist that you sit in a separate room so you can't see each other. And that's because the audience is not going to be able to see you, so she wants to create the environment where people put that emotion into their voice rather than into their face.
Websites Worth Reading
Leap Year Battles: Events in Military History that Happened on Leap Day
Warren Buffett’s Annual Letters: Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters
Female CEOs vs. CEOs Named John : Women CEOs Finally Outnumber Johns
Feeds We Follow
@Brad_Setser: CFR Fellow on Mexico & China
@CoffeeWithTheClassics: What great authors read
@thinkingwest: History told by ancient writers