Hello👋🏻
Welcome to the 17th edition of the “This Week I Learnt” (TWIL) Newsletter. Hope you’re doing well.
Section 1: The TWIL Billboard 🎹 😵💫 🎮 🚪 📊 🛍️ 🍖
Streaming’s impact on pop music, Jevon’s Paradox, Speedrunning and Fraud Detection, Chesterton’s Fence and 2nd Order thinking, Goodhart’s Law, The rise of c-commerce and Grillmakers IPO
Section 2: Tales from the Fortune 500
⚒ Glencore (GLEN): Coal-lateral damage
I’ve got some interesting stories that I came across this week. Hope you enjoy it!
Sit back, relax and read on 📚
📘The TWIL Billboard
🎹 (1) How Streaming is changing Pop-Music
From the time Bono’s lyrics used to kick in 2-minutes into a U2 song to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town road” being just 1:53 long, music streaming is irreversibly changing pop music. The rise of streaming, which pays per play, incentivizes smaller audio bites. Hence, songs are getting shorter, intros are getting way shorter and choruses are being approached sooner
Source: The Economist on the economics of streaming and the impact on pop-songs
😵💫 (2) Jevon’s Paradox | Environmental Economics
Jevons paradox, named after William Jevons, observed that an increase in efficiency of using coal to produce energy tended to increase consumption, rather than reduce it. Why? Because the cheaper price of coal-produced energy encouraged people to find innovative new ways to consume energy. Should energy ratings be a feel-good then?
Source: The Grist on Devon’s Paradox
🎮 (3) Gamers school Scientists | Fraud Detection
Speed-running is a gaming sub-culture where a video game is completed as quickly as humanly possible. About 50 million people cared enough about the authenticity of a Minecraft speed run for a few unpaid mods to create a wholly digital, mathematically robust verification tool. Academia is taking note of this to solve its own rampant fraud
Source: The Atlantic on how gamers are catching fraud better than scientists
🚪(4) Chesterton’s Fence
Chesterton’s Fence is a lesson in second-order thinking. “Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place”. It doesn’t mean don’t move fast and don’t break things; it is but a call to be aware of the cause prompting its existence. Unless we know why someone made a decision, we can’t safely change it or conclude that they were wrong
Source: Farnam Street on the Chesterton’s Fence
📊 (5) Metric’s in-law Goodhart
Metrics and KPIs are the norms for progress monitoring in business. The Goodhart Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Essentially, when performance is measured with a specific metric, optimization becomes the means to the metric end, the system gets “gamed” and the actual value is eroded
Source: Bloomberg Business Week on Goodhart’s Law
🛍️ (6) The rise of c-commerce
Conversational-commerce could unlock $142B in retail spend by 2024, with 2.8B people on messaging platforms. In c-commerce, businesses use AI bots on platforms like China’s WeChat, Apple Business Chat, and Facebook Messenger to connect with customers. Big brands like Lego, Ikea, Sephora, Walmart, and Coca-Cola are all aboard this train.
Source: Automat on conversational commerce
🍖 (7) Grills just wanna have fun
In another episode of who benefitted from the pandemic, your friendly neighbourhood barbecue grill maker is raking in the stonks. Grillmakers were positioned perfectly over the flame during the pandemic when quarantined people fought boredom with hobbies like cooking. Mass-market (Weber) and high-tech (Traeger) grill makers are going public. Fire?
Source: Reuters on grill-maker Weber filing for an IPO
⭐Tales from the Fortune 500:
⚒ Glencore (GLEN): Coal-lateral damage
The Swiss company is the world’s biggest exporter of thermal coal, which is burnt in power stations to generate electricity.
The coal market is rather unique, primarily due to its high fragmentation. The top ten competitors in the coal market made up just 25.27% of the total market in 2018. That said, mining companies are facing new challenges, including heavy debt loads, complex ore bodies and bad PR for environmental damage. If energy sources were in school together, coal is that one class nerd who’s not “cool” but you just can’t do without before your exams.
For most players, Reactive cost-cutting (RCC) has been the strategy of choice. But now, the mining industry has reached an inflexion point. The days when cost-cutting alone could solve every problem are gone. A lean and innovative approach to keeping costs down, while focusing on value outputs is the way forward.
To that end, GLEN has prioritised on a clear line of sight to those technologies (7D BIM, Drones and LIDAR) that create tangible value and better business results by quickly translating in-house problems to collaborative tech solutions that solve them.
Most business problems are like life.
✴️ Be reactive to survive. Be proactive to thrive.
My curated reading List for the Week: 📚📚📚
👚 The Guardian on how renting clothes is worse for the planet than throwing them away
🔍 Search Atlas on Visualizing Divergent Search Results Across Geopolitical Borders
☕ The Guardian on the invisible addiction-Caffeine (I wish this was not medical advice :P)
🔥 ProPublica on modelling climate-related human migration (Hard-hitting. Proceed with caution)
🔮 McKinsey Quarterly on Return as a muscle: The Future of Work
That’s all for today! As always lookout for the next issue on Friday!
Until then. Stay safe. See you soon 👋🏻
- Dhruv
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