1.  The world’s biggest bet on India

“The (iPhone component manufacturing) project is not a one-off. It is part of a new and staggering $90bn investment surge by India’s biggest business that is repositioning itself towards its home market and away from its 30-year strategy of fanning out globally. Tata’s ambition to create electronics factories and semiconductor fabs in India could transform its economy...

“The change in strategy also reflects the dramatic psychological shift within the business world’s most ardent globalisers, as they adapt to new megatrends. These include the rebasing of strategic manufacturing away from China; the rise of a new energy system; and industrial policy, which in India is being championed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“To understand where Tata and India are heading in the 2020s and 2030s you have to go back in time. The company has stayed alive by adapting to technological and political change.”

https://www.economist.com/business/2022/09/14/the-worlds-biggest-bet-on-india

Capital is redeploying away from China, towards markets such as Vietnam, Singapore, and India, as a means to diversify and reduce risk.  Smart strategists will take advantage of these flows…

2. The Texas two-step:  a controversial legal strategy to offload liabilities

“The bankruptcy route taken by Johnson & Johnson, formally called a divisional merger, is better known as the Texas two-step. Greg Gordon, a partner at Jones Day, the law firm that has represented every company that has attempted the move so far, has observed that although some portray it as “the greatest innovation in the history of bankruptcy,” the two-step is more than thirty years old. It came into being in 1989, when the Texas legislature amended its Business Corporation Act, permitting a single corporation to divide into two or more entities, including when facing extremely expensive litigation…

“Johnson & Johnson is the fourth company to attempt the two-step and, thus far, the most brazen, having collapsed the interval between formation and bankruptcy from three months to seventy-two hours. According to a recent Reuters investigation, the two-step plan at Johnson & Johnson was known internally as Project Plato. As one of the lawyers involved wrote in a memo, “It is critical that any activities related to Project Plato, including the mere fact the project exists, be kept in strict confidence.”...

“In the Texas two-step, such releases are particularly audacious, since they shield not only ancillary parties but also the party with the greatest liability, to say nothing of the greatest assets—in this case, Johnson & Johnson, which is seeking protection from both current suits and future talc litigation…

“If companies can use the two-step to protect themselves from any and all consumer liability, even from states themselves, what’s left to hold them accountable?”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/johnson-johnson-and-a-new-war-on-consumer-protection

As we wrote in the chapter on strategy and the law, some strategists look at a law as the definition of what is not allowed or not permitted.  Others look at a law as the definition of what are the limits of what is allowed, i.e. everything-else-goes, constrained only by the imagination.

3.  How to use music to wield political influence

“Standing on makeshift stages in a city park in Colombo (Sri Lanka), groups of musicians such as Skitzo SL banging electric guitars drove adoring crowds into a limb-shaking frenzy.  They were also helping to make a revolution.”

https://asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/Arts/How-music-rocked-Sri-Lanka-s-ruling-class

Some say that history may not repeat, only rhyme.  The narrative of this article rhymes with the Arab Spring events of a decade ago...

4.  Strategies to help you multi-task the demands of today and tomorrow

“Successful pianists have trained their brains to master multi-tasking despite their biological dictates. For them, it boils down to practice, practice, practice. Practice reinforces experience and understanding and makes the required cognitive process easier every time they sit down to play…

“Is that all organisations need? Endless hours perfecting their "skill"?

“In business terms, an organisation’s significant commitment to past strategies and investments can lead to an unwillingness to do things differently…

“The tensions between today and tomorrow sit at the heart of IT strategy. IT organisations face the dilemma of how to manage both simultaneously. They need to move from clinging to the mindset of "this is how we’ve always done it" to being flexible enough to simultaneously embrace success and look toward the future.”

https://techbeacon.com/enterprise-it/piano-lessons-legos-digital-transformation

Some strategists repeatedly practise (as Gladwell suggests).  Others like the team at LEGO change their minds (as Keynes suggests).  What about time-shifting between today and tomorrow?

5.  Strategies in Chinese semiconductor chip design

“Alibaba and start-up Biren Technology are tweaking their most advanced chip designs to reduce processing speeds and avoid US-imposed sanctions aimed at suppressing Chinese computing power…

“Chinese engineers said figuring out what was compliant was complicated because of Washington’s unclear rules for calculating a key metric in the thresholds for chips, called the bidirectional transfer rate, or the speed with which they send data to each other. The export controls cap chips at below 600 gigabytes per second (GB/s).

“There are several ways in which [this transfer rate] can be calculated,” said a senior engineer at Biren, who asked not to be named. The company had begun to tweak its designs to reduce processor speeds in the hope of getting them manufactured by TSMC, the person said.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/chinese-chip-designers-slow-down-processors-to-dodge-us-sanctions/

Another example of cutting-edge tech companies investing behind their legal departments and relying more on legal strategies…