This week’s links:
- China’s influence grows with its economy: from The Wall Street Journal. “Its explosive growth has driven conflicting shifts in Asia and beyond, triggering a scramble for commercial opportunity but fueling unease that the wealth is helping to finance a military buildup to press the communist government’s claims in the region.”
- Acute Multidimensional Poverty: New Index for Developing Countries: A working paper by Sabina Alkire and Maria Emma Santos (reference: The Economist). “The MPI captures a set of direct deprivations that batter a person at the same time. This tool could be used to target the poorest, track the Millennium Development Goals, and design policies that directly address the interlocking deprivations poor people experience.”
- The Summoned Self: by David Brooks. A counter-point to Clay Christensen’s “planned life.” “The second way of thinking about your life might be called the Summoned Life. This mode of thinking starts from an entirely different perspective. Life isn’t a project to be completed; it is an unknowable landscape to be explored.”
- How VCs Think and Fund: Two viewpoints: First Round Capital and Dave McLure.
- Retooling Stale Businesses: by Fred Wilson, who highlights a comment by JLM: “There is a huge opportunity in America today to acquire “old school”, low tech businesses and retool them with modern management, modern marketing including social media, a well crafted financial structure and a dab of leadership to make an otherwise boring business into a highly scalable and expanding enterprise in which the growing size provides an enormous financial operating leverage.”
