MS Excel, Youtube, Grandparents, Growth, Flee
Some great reads from the internet this week
Anyone who has worked in finance or consulting grew up on it, learned to love it over thousands of hours of practice and improvement. Whether they realized it or not, they were becoming programmers, or at least no-code practitioners before the no-code movement took off. “Proficient in the Microsoft Office Suite” is so meaningless that it’s become a meme, but the ability to bend one specific Office program, Excel, to one’s will is a badge of honor.
We have Steve Jobs to thank for Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Excel to thank for Apple. Spreadsheet software was the first truly killer app for the Mac and home PC, and the Mac’s graphical interface helped bring spreadsheets to the masses. The two propelled each others’ growth.
The new children’s media look nothing like what we adults would have expected. They are exuberant, cheap, weird, and multicultural. YouTube’s content for young kids—what I think of as Toddler YouTube—is a mishmash, a bricolage, a trash fire, an explosion of creativity. It’s a largely unregulated, data-driven grab for toddlers’ attention, and, as we’ve seen with the rest of social media, its ramifications may be deeper and wider than you’d initially think.
As YouTube became the world’s babysitter—an electronic pacifier during trips, or when adults are having dinner—parents began to seek out videos that soaked up more time. So nowadays what’s most popular on Toddler YouTube are not three-minute songs, but compilations that last 30 to 45 minutes, or even longer.
The extended childhood is especially puzzling because, as parents know, children are expensive, and that was true long before college tuition and summer camp. Adults have always had to feed and protect the young, and early human brain development uses up a tremendous amount of energy – more than 60 per cent of four-year-olds’ calories go to the brain at rest, compared with around 20 per cent for adults.
It’s hard to simultaneously teach someone else to do something, and to do it effectively yourself. (Sunday pancakes take twice as long when the kids help.) The best evolutionary strategy was to have the old teach the young. Let the peak, prime-of-life performers concentrate on getting things done, and match the younger learners with older, more knowledgeable, but less productive teachers. The grandparents, in their 50s or 60s, weren’t as strong or effective hunters as the 30-year-olds, but they were more likely to be teachers.
Howard Schultz wrote senior management in 2007: "In order to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores we have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience.”
Schultz wrote in his 2011 book Onward: “Growth, we now know all too well, is not a strategy. It is a tactic. And when undisciplined growth became a strategy, we lost our way.”
There was a most convenient size for Starbucks – there is for all businesses. Push past it and you realize that revenue might scale but disappointed customers scale faster, in the same way Robert Wadlow became a giant but struggled to walk.
Now and then, everybody has to flee home. Flee from parents, children, the spouse and the city. And, if you are Indian, flee from India. Upper-class Indians used to look forward to their periodic escapes from the difficult nation. They were not all terribly rich, just upper middle-class and beyond. They used to quit India once or twice a year by means of a straightforward vacation, work assignment or compassionate visit to an ailing relative abroad. Some would participate in amateur sports competitions held overseas, like triathlons. Even do-gooders fled to attend conferences in beautiful places. But the pandemic has stranded them all, and made them endure India for too long without respite. Even Indians with long-stay Schengen and American visas could not leave because of travel restrictions. Or because it was simply unwise. After all, India has somehow emerged as one of the safest places in the world.
Thanks for reading through. Have a safe Holi!
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