The Weekly Distillation No.35
Coronavirus; Systemising Yourself; Different Realities; Transhumanism; Cryptocurrency; and SPACs
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This newsletter is written for entrepreneurial organisational leaders and aims to help map current events to longer term themes of our context and provide questions, tips and tools that can help in navigating these times.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” - Shakespeare (Cassius in Julius Caesar)
“It is now time to open Texas 100%” - Governor Greg Abbott
“I very much fear for the younger generation of writers. What I’m concerned about is that there is self-censorship going on, that they will not produce the works that they really want to produce or would have produced – which we would really value — because there is a fear that they are going to get trolled or cancelled or there is going to be some anonymous lynch mob that turns up online and makes their lives a misery.” - Nobel Prize-winning author Sir Kazuo Ishiguro
“From 1 CE to 1500 CE, no region in the world—including China—had a larger share of global GDP. Its copious supply of pearls, diamonds, ivory, ebony, and spices ensured that India ran what amounted to a thousand-year trade surplus.” - Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt
Coronavirus
Three things struck me this week on Coronavirus (aside from the obvious question from above where one country has locked down heavily and the other has not and yet the charts are the same….). Firstly, the numbers of cases and fatalities are (thankfully) declining, which is leading to the lockdown in Scotland being unlocked step by step marginally faster than we were expecting. Which is good news - and this unwinding faster than expected is likely to continue. Secondly, there are signs that the rate of decline in cases in England is slowing - possibly new variants, but more likely a combination of Spring (more people out meeting others) and lockdown fatigue (same). Thirdly, there are some worrying signs of long-covid in people under 18 - with the Office of National Statistics reporting 13% of under 11’s having at least one symptom five weeks after an infection.
If you’re tired of Zoom, you are not alone. Here is Stanford’s ideas on why and how to combat it. If you’re tired of lockdown - don’t go on a riot like the Dutch did….although this seems to be about Cocaine shipments as much as it is about personal liberty.
Consensus now is for a strong unwinding of restrictions pre-summer, with all restrictions gone by Q4. Economic recovery in Q4 is a central case - although this may slip into 2022. What’s your plan to capitalise in the start of the Roaring 20’s?
Systemisation
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I wrote about delegation recently, as a way of elevating your leadership. One way is to delegate to other people, another way is to systemise the action and automate it - taking yourself out of the loop. This week saw me involved in the sale of an exciting Scottish drinks business and beginning the global marketing process of the opportunity. After two days of 9 or 10 hours of Zoom calls and phone calls, and a couple of days of sending and receiving over 200 emails, I was reflecting on how inefficient a lot of how we work is.
On Friday my time at my desk involved receiving an email every 180 seconds, and sending an email every 180 seconds on average. How many of those could I honestly say were thoughtful and necessary?
In the past, a focused marketing would have involved hundreds of emails, chases, answering questions. Thanks to the work of some colleagues more intelligent than me and the creation of a v2.0 of our fundraising platform, we can strip out a lot of the human interaction, standardise a process, and push one button. This frees us up to build relationships, be creative, provide more advice and add more value.
Five areas that I think are inefficient and systems that can help:
Arranging meetings (Calendly)
Staying on top of your task list (Remember the milk)
Tracking your budget performance (Xero + Bank API for a business; Yolt for individuals)
Basic Project Management updates (Asana)
Team meetings (these can be great - but often are about sharing info rather than tackling issues) (Slack for updates)
What’s on your to do list that actually just needs to be systemised?
Risk On or Risk Off?
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The stated rationale of crypto currency is really interesting. The removal of any Central Bank ability to just print more money, destroying the value of your savings. A de-centralised monetary system that no-one owns. An incorruptible ledger of every trade and expenditure so fraud dies away. A currency you can spend around the world and that is digital, so you don’t have to pay payments transfer fees, foreign exchange commissions and ATM withdrawal charges. What the world has been waiting for?
And yet.
The lack of ability for Government Agencies (you know who) to be able to track money transfers is unlikely to persist. If you doubt the value of “follow the money” in anti-terrorism work, go and have a read of how the Israelis did it in Harpoon. Bitcoin and Crypto will become a heavily regulated currency ultimately - reducing many of the benefits the system allows.
Although there is no Central Bank depreciating the value of your currency, there is immense speculative money (see Tesla) flooding into BTC. I have lost count of people who do not work in finance who are telling me that they have bought Bitcoin or Ethereum.
I had a fascinating conversation with someone very involved in the gold trade this week. He told me that 1) settlement times on Bitcoin are way slower than Gold 2) most people hold Bitcoin via Coinbase, removing the whole decentralised network aspect of it and creating massive central agency risk 3) fees are way higher than with Gold trading.
This Bloomberg opinion is fascinating. Here’s what Margins has to say (from an ex FX trader).
The long desired usability of a digital currency is some way off too, with overall adoption rates still not high enough when it comes to spending the currency in shops, cafes, restaurants, public transport etc. However - this will come. But a highly volatile currency, driven up and down by financial speculation, does not make for a good currency for buying your coffee. As Margins says, a stable currency with a small uplift (inflation??) would be the best outcome for retail use.
The Bloomberg article points out that Satoshi’s Bitcoins are now worth $50bn. If this was ever to be realised, the author of the article believes this would cause a financial crash like never seen before.
I spoke with someone this week who operates in high end property purchases, often for overseas money, into Scotland. They said that the market has gone crazy busy, to a point where you would not believe how much money is flooding in. And that it’s not obvious what has triggered it.
The day traders who went after the “stonks” stocks (e.g. Gamestop) are now chasing after SPACs. I spoke with a sophisticated and knowledgeable professional in my industry recently who couldn’t explain a SPAC. And yet day traders are there. This bodes well :-(
With $2 trillion of more debt being created and pumped into the US economy, the money wall continues - which will flow into stocks, bonds and crypto. However, we’re clearly riding an asset bubble - although when this ends is anyone’s guess. Crypto will have its uses, as will the Blockchain, but I’ll be avoiding the chance to speculate on near term and long term fluctuations.
A Long Read for the Weekend
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I’ve been following Om Malik’s writings for close on a decade, given his insights and perspectives into the tech landscape of Silicon Valley. This post on the shared (un)realities of our society was thought provoking. You see this outworking in politics, business, media and other segments of culture. And you see it in the field of Transhumanism, where some see it as a panacea to avoid death and illness, and others see it as the end of humanity. What kind of future do you build when there isn’t any acceptance of a shared truth?
Thanks for reading. As ever, if you liked it, please share it.