The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• The Physics of Kaizen: Why Somebody Should Get Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened: Toyota’s culture of Kaizen: continuous improvement. It is an obvious statement: companies should be continually improving. Companies that are able to successfully adopt a culture and practice of Kaizen have the ability to establish a dominant position in their market. (Taylor Pearson)
• The $100 billion bet that a postindustrial US city can reinvent itself as a high-tech hub: Can a massive infusion of money for making computer chips transform the economy of Syracuse and show us how to rebuild the nation’s industrial base? (MIT Technology Review)
• How to Do Great Work: If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it. Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it’s not just a point labelled “work hard.” The following recipe assumes you’re very ambitious. (Paul Graham)
• How to Make Money by Losing $300,000 a Year on Slot Machines: Millions of people tune in to see others tackle the casino mainstay. ‘It’s fun to watch somebody else play with their money while you’re sitting on your couch drinking a beer.’ (Wall Street Journal)
• Inside the AI Factory: As the technology becomes ubiquitous, a vast tasker underclass is emerging — and not going anywhere. (The Verge)
• How Tom Brady’s Crypto Ambitions Collided With Reality: The superstar quarterback is among the celebrities dealing with the fallout from the crypto crash. Others, like Taylor Swift, escaped. (New York Times)
• Walmart Is Quietly Growing Into an E-Retail Tech Titan. The world’s biggest retailer stumbled in the early innings of the e-commerce revolution. Now that Walmart has found its footing, it’s poised for big profits. The Stock Is a Buy. (Barron’s)
• The Big Penis War: The inventor of the world’s first cosmetic penile implant says a group of Houston doctors is trying to steal his ideas. Inside the multimillion-dollar feud. (Texas Monthly)
• A New Map of the Universe, Painted With Cosmic Neutrinos: Physicists finally know where at least some of these high-energy particles come from, which helps make the neutrinos useful for exploring fundamental physics. (Quanta Magazine)
• Shattered Nerves, Sleepless Nights: Pickleball Noise Is Driving Everyone Nuts: The incessant pop-pop-pop of the fast-growing sport has brought on a nationwide scourge of unneighborly clashes, petitions, calls to the police and lawsuits, with no solution in sight. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson, which manages $1.5 trillion dollar in client assets. She has worked at FT since 1988, and held leadership roles in investment management, distribution, technology, operations, and high-net-worth clients. Franklin Templeton oversees more than 9000 employees and 1300 investment professionals. Johnson is on the list of most powerful women (Barron’s, Forbes, American Banker, and more). She has been CEO February 2020.
Imploding breadth is historically ultra-bullish
Source: New York Post
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