| Sunday, 01 June 2025 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Welcome to First Principles.
Hari and I are holding down the fort until Rohin is back from his vacation, so we’ll be doing without his thoughtful perspectives for a couple of weeks. We do, however, have our usual book recommendations and photo album, and a couple of cool things we’re doing that I want to share with you today.
It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve come to an understanding about a particularly insidious weakness of mine.
I confuse talking about how to solve a problem with making actual progress solving it. Get a few enthusiastic people together and spitball ideas for an hour? Love it—so many good ideas; so many opportunities I never saw before. Catch a friend during a chai break for an impromptu brainstorming session? Yes please. And let’s extend that to two chais and an egg puff.
Of course, as days and weeks of this incredibly fertile-seeming debate carry on, and the wonderful possibilities you’ve collected pile up, the problem just sits there. Unsolved. And more often than not, getting harder to solve with each passing moment.
It took me an embarrassingly long while to realise that while all those conversations were in fact productive in seeding inspiration, they were entirely useless (if not actually destructive) without structure and focus.
Don’t get me wrong. Groups, communities can be incredibly powerful tools for innovation. The more diverse the better. But not all questions benefit from group debate, and it is all too easy to use them the wrong way. Group bias, polarisation, the common knowledge effect… all rear their heads. There are a couple of excellent articles from Harvard Business Review that break down these problems at a gratifyingly deep level, so check them out when you have time: Why Groups Struggle to Solve Problems Together, and Some Questions Benefit from Group Discussion. Others Don’t.
But once you are cognizant of the pitfalls and structure your discussions to avoid them, what groups genuinely interested in innovation can do when pulling together is amazing.
I enjoy reading The Ken because it is informative, the articles are well researched, well written, without the spin and bias. I admire The Ken team for their dedication to getting closer to the true picture.
Hari Buggana
Chairman and MD, InvAscent
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Harshil Mathur
CEO and Co-Founder, Razorpay
The Ken has proven naysayers wrong by successfully running a digital news publication on a pure-subscription business model in India. They have shown that discerning readers are willing to pay for well-researched, well-written, in-dept news articles.
Kiran Mazumdar Shaw
Executive Chairperson, Biocon Limited
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Rahul Gonsalves
Co-founder and CEO, Obvious Ventures