A new shape

Let’s assume that we will soon live in a world in which intelligence - narrowly defined - is cheap. In this world, any job that primarily depends on the manipulation of information - on a knowledge of rules, on conventional uses of language, on data-based analysis - comes under threat. Which qualities and attributes become relatively more valuable?... See more

To win one of these coveted positions, then, you need to do everything exactly right from your freshman year of high school onward: get good grades, garner strong recommendations, work in the right labs, publish papers in prestigious places, never make anybody mad, and never take a detour or a break. (I occasionally get emails from high schoolers... See more

Risk is expensive, and it does not figure into P&L. When the pressure is to show YoY growth on the quarterly basis, as is the case of the publicly traded companies, or when expectation is to deliver wild returns in case of PE-backed ones, no one wants to make anything remotely surprising or different. Prada is able to put forward fearless... See more

“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas... See more

In Japanese culture, the discomfort of silence is not only acknowledged but embraced through the concept of ma.

Ma refers to the spaces between—between sounds, between actions, between words. It’s the pause between breaths in conversation, the silence between notes in music, the stillness that gives meaning to movement. Yet Ma isn’t interpreted as... See more

True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization… We need them