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IN THIS ISSUE
Chip wars
How checks and balances help The thinker’s mind
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Over the weekend, we published D
Shivakumar’s recommendations of the top 10
books on business and leadership published this year. He is Group Executive President,
Corporate Strategy & Business Development at Aditya Birla Group and we know
of him as a voracious reader. (We have a Twitter
Spaces conversation with Shivakumar on December 8 at 7 pm. Do set a reminder.)
One book that makes it to his list is The
Earned Life by Marshall Goldsmith that we had particularly enjoyed. There
is much to soak in on its pages. Why don’t you ask for help enough, for
instance, is a question Goldsmith tackles head on.
“You would not hesitate to call a
doctor if you were in extreme physical pain, or a plumber if your kitchen sink
was clogged, or a lawyer if you were in legal trouble. You know how to ask for
help. And yet there are moments in each day when asking for help is clearly the
better choice and you decline to do so. Beware two situations in
particular.
“The first is when you are ashamed to
seek help because doing so will expose your ignorance or incompetence. The
teaching professional at a golf club once told me that fewer than 20 percent of
the three hundred members at her club had ever taken a lesson from her. They
were too embarrassed by their faulty swing to let her help them. ‘I pay my
bills giving lessons to the thirty or forty best golfers at the club,’ she
said. ‘They only want to shoot better scores. They don’t care how they got
there or who helped them. Their scorecard doesn’t care either.’
“The second situation begins when you
tell yourself, ‘I should be able to do this on my own.’ You fall into this trap
when the task you’re facing is adjacent to knowledge or a skill you think you
already possess. You’re driving through a familiar neighbourhood, so you should
be able to reach your destination with no need for directions from your phone’s
GPS. You’ve given speeches before, so you don’t need a friend’s helping ear to
fine-tune a wedding toast or your most important sales presentation of the
year.
“I do not have this problem anymore,
which is why ‘Did I do my best to ask for help?’ is no longer on my list of
basic Daily Questions. I declared victory in this battle many years ago, when I
asked myself what task or challenge in my life could be more profitably and
efficiently dealt with alone rather than with solicited help from other people—and
couldn’t come up with an answer. You should too.”
Allow that to sink in. And
have a good day!
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One of the most compelling battles of
our times is the Sino-US standoff on technology. Clearly, the Americans are
worried about how China’s tech capabilities are growing and some weeks ago, the
Biden administration announced a sweeping set of controls that cuts China’s
access to semiconductors. How do we decode this? What are the Americans
thinking? How might China react? What implications will this have on business?
Where does India stand? To explore these questions, our co-founder Indrajit
Gupta engaged in a conversation with G Venkat Raman, sinologist and professor
at IIM Indore. There was much he had to say on all of this.
“Given the national security
implications, the central government needs to cobble coalitions within the
country and develop public private partnerships with advanced educational
institutions and private companies that have high tech prowess. These
partnerships will bring new sources of funding for R&D and also more public
discourse and awareness.”
You won’t want to miss this
podcast!
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How checks and balances help |
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In Harvard Business Review, Dr.
Noam Wasserman, dean, Sy Syms School of Business at Yeshiva University, argues
that checks and balances such as having a strong and independent board,
financial audits and regulations, are key to avoiding fiascos such as the
recent FTX case.
He writes that the lack of oversight in
the FTX case, “was seemingly so extreme that it makes Zuckerberg’s iron grip on
Facebook look like a democracy.”
There were a number of red flags that
VCs and others ignored. He writes: “At least Facebook (now Meta) has a board of
directors and audited financials. FTX resisted creating an official board of
directors until January, the VCs who invested in FTX did not get board
seats—and its financials were an epic mess. Top executives included several of
the founder’s college friends. And it was headquartered in the Bahamas,
reportedly because of its lighter regulatory touch.”
Some founders might resist checks and
balances because it could stifle them, and therefore the innovation that they
bring to the table. However, Wasserman says they help founders themselves,
employees and the society at large.
He writes: “Founders benefit from
checks and balances because they increase the value of the company, as my
former Harvard Business School collaborator, venture capitalist Jeffrey
Bussgang, explained for HBR last week. It makes the company more trustworthy,
easier to finance, and less likely to implode.
“For those same reasons,
checks and balances help employees. It raises the value of their equity and
lessens the risk of an in-over-their-head founder messing up their careers. And
as we have seen from FTX, checks and balances help society at large by
preventing frauds and bank runs.”
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Warm regards,
Team Founding Fuel
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