After a crazy seven-odd busy weeks, I'm looking forward to two weeks of relative quiet with zero work travel (although there's a short holiday planned end of the year) and some work on the book (no pressure!).

Here's wishing everyone a merry Christmas and a memorable holiday period!

And now, on to the newsletter.

Welcome to the ninety-fifth edition of '3-2-1 by Story Rules'.

A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:

3 tweets
2 articles, and
1 long-form content piece

Let's dive in.

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

I agree with this. The substance and framing of you idea matters more than 'writerly polish'.

There needs to be a balance, of course. Great ideas expressed without clarity would not be understood. But once you have breached the clarity barrier, instead of literary polish, it is better to focus on storytelling engagement tools to your work.

What are those tools you ask? Well, it turns out I'm writing a book about them! You just have to wait for 7-8 months and you'll find out. :)

Have I mentioned before that I'm crazy about maps? Especially cool ones like these that give you a whole new perspective about your own country?

Great analogy!

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. 'Why India’s Food Is the Best in the World' by Tyler Cowen

The title of this piece seems like a Whatsapp forward from your uncle on the lines of "UNESCO declares Indian food to be the best in the world". But it's actually written by the highly respected economist, Tyler Cowen, who clearly happens to like Indian food very much:

For me, it is common for a random meal here, sometimes costing only a few dollars, to be more enjoyable than one from a starred Michelin restaurant in Paris. In India, the flavors are more vivid, the vegetables are at least as fresh and varied, the astonishments more common. Food in India is just flat out better than most of what you get elsewhere, with the possible exception of China, which I have not visited in several years.

Cowen believes that food is more fresh in India because of shorter supply chains:

First, food supply chains here are typically very short. Trucking, refrigeration and other aspects of modernity are widespread, but a lot of supply chains are left over from a time when those were luxuries. So if you are eating a vegetable, there is a good chance it came from nearby. That usually means it is more fresh and tastes better.

(Could the above also be because the average farm size in India is small and so every region would be growing it's own vegetables? Plus, given our tropical climate, pretty much all parts of India can grow most staple vegetables?)

Another advantage Cowen mentions: Because of a large supply of cheap labour, it's not difficult to get cooks who can put in time to make a dish good:

...there is plenty of cheap labor competing to cook for diners with higher incomes. The “thickness” of the competition leads to innovation and experimentation — there are a lot of restaurants, food stalls, truck stops and the like. It is a buyer’s market. Furthermore, some of India’s best dishes, such as Bengali sweets, are very labor-intensive. Indian desserts that are mediocre in US restaurants receive the proper care and attention in Kolkata.

High local customer standards may also be a factor:

Then there is the cultural side. India is a “food nation.” When I ask locals which are the best places to eat, which I regularly do, I am repeatedly struck by how many have strong opinions. When everyone is a food critic, standards rise accordingly. It also makes it easy for the visitor to get quality recommendations.

b. Shantanu Deshpande on our poor eating habits (LinkedIn post)

Even as Cowen extols the virtues of Indian cuisine, Shantanu Deshpande (founder of Bombay Shaving Company) laments about our growing dependence on unhealthy quick eats. He is referring to the new announcement by delivery companies to offer 10-minute meals:

'Cook time 2 min, delivery time 8 min'

A 'qcom for food' founder told me this and I lost my mind.

We are suffering from the biggest epidemic of poor nutrition and unhealthy processed and ultra processed food which is high on palm oil and sugar.

Our grains have lost nutrition over last 50 years as we prioritized agricultural yield for nutrition.

Our junk food addiction, fuelled by 49 rs pizzas and 20 rs poison energy drinks and 30 rs burgers, is taking us down the path of China and US without the economic cover needed for health.

And now this.

His appeal to the companies - can we do something about the nutritional value please?

Zomato and Swiggy and Zepto - please, dont. And if you are so keen, please make the product palatable.

I would LOVE if we innovate and are able to actually give non-stale and decent food in 10 min. Massive unlock. But I don't think we're close to there yet.

Tricky one right? If the consumer wants convenience, should companies just offer that? Or should they try to slowly bend customer preferences towards healthier choices...?

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'Aswath Damodaran: The Corporate Life Cycle' n the Talking Billions Podcast with Bogumil Baranowski

(Thanks to Nitesh Jain for the great reco!)

When the don of valuation speaks, one listens. Professor Damodaran is so clear, so assured and so engaging in his storytelling, that even someone like me (who is not really interested in investing and valuation), is hooked to the conversation.

He speaks about the concept of the corporate life cycle, and how it is important to know at what stage a company (and economy) is in that life cycle. Here are some interesting findings that I learnt in the episode:

The growth rate gap between US and EU has been stark in the last 20 years:

Twenty years ago, the US looked like it might go the way of Europe, but if you look at European growth versus US growth, US real growth has been higher and more robust than European real growth. It's paid off, because in a sense, the US has moved into the 21st century without kicking and screaming. Europe has stayed in the 20th century. Name me one great tech company that's come out of Europe. I can't.

If you look at the Brazil stock index- you would find it filled with all old companies - which is not a good sign:

I was in Brazil, about six or seven months ago. And I was going to talk about the corporate life cycle. So just out of curiosity, I pulled up the BVESPA, Brazilian Equity Index. I looked at the companies in the index to see where they fell in the life cycle.

If you get a chance, check it out. I mean, almost every company there is an old-time company, Vale, Petrobras, a financial service, a bank that's around... There are no young companies there, which tells me that Brazil might talk about encouraging entrepreneurship and growth, but many of these companies don't break out of the pack.

You don’t have to be right to make money in equities, you just have to be less wrong than others:

The nature of equities is you're trying to forecast the future, and you'll be wrong 100% of the time. You just hope you're wrong in the right direction rather than the wrong direction. And here's the consolation prize. You don't have to be right to make money. You just have to be less wrong than everybody else.

Corporate life cycles are getting shorter:

...the typical 21st century company has a compressed life cycle. I mean, using tech as an example, I've described tech companies as aging in dog years. The legend is dogs age seven times faster than human beings. Tech companies scale up incredibly fast. Take Yahoo! Founded in 1992, a hundred billion dollar company by 1999, seven years to get from nothing to a hundred billion. What took Ford and GE decades to do, Yahoo! did in seven years. Amazing, right?

(But) The days at the top lasted exactly four years. You can almost time it to the day Google went public, because Yahoo!'s decline began in 2003 and 4. By 2012, Yahoo! was dead as a company. They hired Marissa Meyer, trying to get them back from the dead. It was way too late. By 2015, Yahoo! rest in peace, the company was done.

Big Tech cant abuse their monopoly - they are always looking over their shoulders:

...last week, I wrote a piece on the Department of Justice, (which) targeted Alphabet (the parent of Google) for a breakup because of the antitrust laws. And one of my counters was, these are not the kinds of companies, we have to worry about them getting so big that they're going to act like monopolies. Because monopolies do monopoly things, which is they abuse their customers, they charge sky-high prices. These companies can't afford to do it. They're always looking over the shoulder. I guarantee you that at the big tech companies, they're not sitting pretty saying, oh, things are great. They're saying, what's coming after us?

Listen to the conversation even if you aren't into markets and investing - it'll leave you wiser about how smart investors think about the world.

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

PS: If you found this thought-provoking or useful, please consider forwarding it to a friend or colleague.

And if you got this email as a forward, you can get your own copy here.

Access this email on a browser or share this email on WhatsApp, LinkedIn, or Twitter. You can access the archive of previous newsletter posts here.

You are getting this email as a part of the 3-2-1 by Story Rules Newsletter. To get your own copy, sign up here.

Ravishankar Iyer

Damodaran on the Corporate Life Cycle (3-2-1 by Story Rules #95)

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

How to Introduce Yourself Better (3-2-1 by Story Rules #94)

A Fascinating History of Modern Hinduism (3-2-1 by Story Rules #93)

How to Teach so Students Actually Learn (3-2-1 by Story Rules #92)