Facts and Figures
53%...of Fortune 500 CEOs expect their revenues to be significantly stronger this year than what they expected before the pandemic.
74%... of Fortune 500 CEOs say they expect to need less office space in the future.
(Here’s guessing that at least one of those estimates proves to be just a bit off…)
60.1% — Year-over-year change [2020 versus 2019] in the combined market capitalization of Fortune 500 companies, up to $32.7 trillion.
-29.8% — Year-over-year drop [2020 versus 2019] in the combined profits of Fortune 500 companies, falling to $859 billion. That's the biggest drop since 2009.
Quoted
“Installing air samplers in places such as day cares and airplanes, [Marr] frequently found the flu virus where the textbooks said it shouldn’t be—hiding in the air, most often in particles small enough to stay aloft for hours. And there was enough of it to make people sick. In 2011, this should have been major news. Instead, the major medical journals rejected her manuscript. Even as she ran new experiments that added evidence to the idea that influenza was infecting people via aerosols, only one niche publisher was receptive to her work. In the siloed world of academia, aerosols had always been the domain of engineers and physicists, and pathogens purely a medical concern; Marr was one of the rare people who tried to straddle the divide. ‘I was definitely fringe.’”
Books
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment — Kahneman’s 2011 work “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is a Hall-of-Fame book in my opinion. His new book, written with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, is also excellent and well worth your time, if not quite up to the prior standard. The main idea is that there is an enormous cost ( in money, time, health, etc.) in the well-studied bias (systematic deviations) in our systems, but also in the less-studied noise (random scatter). There numbers and stories to illuminate the insidious problem of widely varied judgments and decisions given similar or identical circumstances.
Various reviews/profiles/interviews:
A Sand County Almanac — I recently took a golf trip to the area featured in this book and where it is celebrated as local lore. It’s a rambling paean to Mother Nature and it reminds me of Let My People Go Surfing and One Man’s Wilderness.
Articles
The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill — Multi-disciplinary thinking rules the day, yet again. We all know about the myriad mistakes in the world’s Covid-19 response, but there is fascinating detail about the basis of it. “The distinction between droplet and airborne transmission has enormous consequences. [The medical canon] drew the line between droplets and aerosols at 5 microns. There was just one literally tiny problem: ‘The physics of it is all wrong.’
“Randall had studied citation tracking, a type of scholastic detective work. Part of medical rhetoric is understanding why certain ideas take hold and others don’t… The groundbreaking results were published in 1962 with the first incontrovertible evidence that a human disease—tuberculosis—could be airborne. In 1963, [Langmuir] emphasized that the problematic particles were smaller than 5 microns. Scientists inside the CDC conflated his observations. They plucked the size of the particle that transmits tuberculosis out of context, making 5 microns stand in for a general definition of airborne spread. Wells’ 100-micron threshold got left behind. Over time, through blind repetition, the error sank deeper into the medical canon. (The CDC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) But getting to the bottom of the 5-micron myth was only the first step…”
Kevin Durant and (Possibly) the Greatest Basketball Team of All-Time — As far as celebrity/athlete profiles go — and as far as writing in general goes — this is as good as it gets.
Millennials Are Running Out of Time to Build Wealth — “In almost every way measurable, millennials in the U.S. at age 40 re doing worse financially than the generations that came before them.” I’m plenty critical of the profligacy of prior generations, and I’m plenty aware of the importance of timing/luck, but I don’t think the premise of this article holds. Many of the numbers and the resulting conclusions are incontrovertible, but I think the overall thrust of the article is oversimplified. Either way, there is plenty of food for thought here.
Exit, Voice, Blackrock: Why Shareholder Democracy Isn’t — In case you missed it, business writer Roger Lowenstein has a substack and I highly recommend it.
The Psychological Benefits of Commuting to Work — I tend to agree with most of this article. “Many people who have been working from home are experiencing a void they can’t quite name….[even though] the commute ranked as the single most miserable part of our day, according to Daniel Kahneman’s research. But here’s the strange part. Many people liberated from the commute have experienced a void they can’t quite name. In it, all theaters of life collapse into one. There are no beginnings or endings. ‘No commute may be hurting, not helping, remote worker productivity,’ a Microsoft report warned last fall. In a 2001 paper, two researchers at UC Davis attempted to divine the ideal commute time. They settled on 16 minutes. To be sure, this was a substantial shortening of the study participants’ actual commutes (which were half an hour, on average). But it was not zero. In fact, a few wished for a longer commute. Asked why, they ticked off their reasons—the feeling of control in one’s own car; the time to plan, to decompress, to make calls, to listen to audiobooks. Clearly, the researchers wrote, the commute had some ‘positive utility.’”
Hot Pants, Love Potions, and the Go-Go Genesis of Southwest Airlines — Great headline. And some interesting details from the history of Southwest to commemorate 50 years of flying. As for forecasts: “So what about the next fifty years? ‘Who knows?’ [Southwest CEO Gary] Kelly says. ‘Maybe we’ll have flying cars or something. But I kind of doubt it. Here we are, fifty years after 1971, and we still fly the same type of airplane.’” (h/t JPK for sending this!)
How America Fractured into Four Parts — Long, and controversial by nature, but worth some thought.
He Thought He Could Outfox the Gig Economy. He Was Wrong — An in-depth and gut-wrenching look at the life of a gig driver. “Jeffrey Fang was a ride-hailing legend, a top earner with relentless hustle. Then his minivan was carjacked—with his kids in the back seat.”
How Amazon, JP Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway Took on American Healthcare — and Lost — An obituary of Haven has many good lessons, but even more unanswered questions.
This is the Story of a Man Who Jumped into Lake Michigan Every Day for Nearly a Year — Well, this is one way to manage through a pandemic.
The Silicon Valley of Turf: how the UK’s pursuit of the perfect pitch changed football — If you’ve ever wondered about the Moneyball-esque angle of turf management, or just how they get the grass looking so good in mid-January, there is fascinating stuff here. “If you were looking for somewhere to place a world-class sports pitch, inside Wembley stadium would be a bad choice….[like]cultivating grass in a shoebox. Between September and March, the 50-metre-high stands cast a shadow across the turf [and] light levels rarely exceed 12 micromoles, well below the 20 micromoles that grass typically needs to grow. Airflow is also poor. Without a breeze passing over it, grass becomes ‘lazy,’ as turf experts put it, and eventually it will keel over and die. Standley…uses a subsurface aeration system to increase moisture and oxygen levels in the the sand and composites that run 30cm below the surface, known as the ‘rootzone.’ [H]e also runs hot water through underground pipes to bring the temperature in the upper rootzone up to 17°C. Once the seeds have put out shoots, he rolls out lighting rigs and six gargantuan fans to simulate summer conditions. What looks like a normal patch of grass is in reality a ‘giant chemistry set.’ The English grounds-management sector alone is valued at more than £1bn and employs more than 27,000 people, with specialists in every area, from seed enthusiasts who can breed grasses that grow in the shade to scientists who develop chemicals to make grass greener…It was a big moment for English football talent when Real Madrid poached Paul Burgess from Arsenal in 2009. After starting his career at Blackpool FC, Burgess had arrived at Arsenal in 1999, rising to prominence at the age of just 21. Four years later, he put in another commanding performance at the European Championships. Not long after that, Real Madrid, the most prestigious club in world football, made their sensational transfer swoop. If you don’t remember any of this, it’s not because Burgess was a flop at Madrid. It’s because he was Arsenal’s head groundsman.”