Thought on leadership

Satish Pradhan who is the Exec VP of the Tata Group had to say this about leaders

"People need the leaders to paint an exciting picture of the future but equally don't want a complete gift wrapped package that they can't add themselves to! There is a tight rope walk between the visualisation of the countours, coordinates and hues of an inspiring enough future and giving people the space to add their own mountains and rivers or even small flowers and blades of grass to the picture to create a powerful shared vision of a desirable future that has a compelling pull for the people. "I want to understand how I and what I do fits into the big picture".

Makes so much sense

Interview

Nice interview of MasterCard CEO.

Execution orientation

In continuation of the trend of getting people from the corporate sector, the government has gone ahead and formed a panel of industry experts who have credentials of implementation of great ideas as thats where we need the brightest minds today - translating big ideas into changes on the ground.

One thing that is strong about this government is the interest in getting the right people on board. Will come to the area where it is showing biggest signs of concern.

Lithium deposit in Afghanistan

One of the interesting stories which serves as a refreshing break from the usual monologue of insane taliban and a state of war in Afghanistan is the story of discovery of lithium deposits worth 1 trillion $ that has the potential to reform its economy enormously. You can read it here.

As we take a look at its economic potential in isolation without looking at the more structural aspects of this discovery, everything seems hunky dory about the huge demand of this element in manufacturing of batteries and hence the potential of seeing a beeline of nations like US, Russia and China to get access to this deposit.

A couple of days later a very insightful article written by Amity Shlaes using black hat thinking to understand how such deposits can cause further damage in the absence of structures of democracy and property rights which surely are critical to take the best advantage of such potential economic conditions. The writer shares interesting perspectives from nations which failed to use their natural bounty unlike Botswana which was able to attain what appears attainable at the outset only because it had the requisite political and legal underpinnings.

The correlation between economics and politics is very clearly elicited by this instance. Really liked the effort to examine the situation from a more objective standpoint.