Don’t take ghosting at work personally

It doesn’t just take a dating app to get ghosted. It also happens during professional interactions — all the time. When you’re working to build a network, a sudden silence can easily shatter your confidence. You’re left retracing your steps to see where you went wrong, or worse, in limbo, wondering if it’s appropriate to follow up. So, why do people ghost? It can be a variety of reasons, but most often, it’s to avoid conflict or awkward situations. This may stem from social anxiety, burnout, or in the worst case, plain and simple carelessness. Whatever it is, people who ghost are often unknowingly following a classic pleasure principle, popularized by Sigmund Freud. Motivated by the pursuit of pleasure while seeking to avoid pain, “ghosts” tend to decide to abandon interactions at the first hint of discomfort. If you’re reading this and even mildly cringing throughout, you might be a ghost. (Guess what? Research shows that personally or professionally, most of us have been one at some point or another.) Know that your dangling conversations can, however, have a clean ending.

(Adapted from “So, You Got Ghosted — at Work,” by Kristi DePaul, published on May 25, 2021, by Harvard Business Review Ascend)

The odd man out among billionaires

Bernard Arnault of LVMH is the odd man out among the techie multibillionaires. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg — four of the five wealthiest people in the world, by Bloomberg’s tally — all made their money as technologists and engineers. Judging by their success, technology is the one world-changing, the fortune-making engine of the day. But in third place, behind Bezos and Musk but ahead of Gates and Zuckerberg is Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world’s largest maker of luxury goods. He is a purveyor of sparkling wine, leather goods, clothing, jewellery, watches, and perfume. These are products that have existed—in less glamorous forms, to be sure—for hundreds or even thousands of years. They are at the cutting edge of fashion, but definitely not of technology. Any conclusions you formed about the nature of the modern economy by considering Bezos, Musk, Gates, and Zuckerberg have to be revisited in light of Arnault’s net worth of $167 billion as of May 27, up $53 billion just since the start of the year.

(Adapted from “Great Fortunes Are Built On Great Tech Or Handbags and Bubbly,” by Peter Coy, published on May 27, 2021, Bloomberg Businessweek)

Musk and bitcoin’s rollercoaster

When Elon Musk speaks, bitcoin investors listen. The Tesla chief executive’s often-cryptic messages have sent bitcoin’s price on a roller-coaster ride this year. Prices soared nearly 20pc one January morning when he added “#bitcoin” to his Twitter bio. They jumped 16pc in a single day the following month after Tesla revealed it bought $1.5bn worth of the cryptocurrency. Then, he tweeted earlier this month that Tesla would no longer accept bitcoin as payment for its vehicles. Investors widely blame the tweet for starting bitcoin’s most punishing selloff of the year, a rout that has shaved hundreds of billions of dollars off its market capitalization and has erased gains made since late January. After peaking in mid-April near $65,000, bitcoin prices have fallen some 50pc, including roughly 40pc since Musk’s May tweet.

(Adapted from “Elon Musk Has Become Bitcoin’s Biggest Influencer, Like It or Not,” by Akane Otani, published on May 23, 2021, by the Wall Street Journal)

The global pharma opportunity

Pakistan, with a local market of 215m consumers and more than 700 pharmaceutical companies is poised well to gain from opportunities provided by the shuffling pharmaceutical global patterns of supply and demand. However, the current practice of simply importing 95pc of the raw material, compounding active ingredients with excipients, coating the pills, and packaging the drugs cannot continue to be the long-term goal of the sector. A larger vision recognises the gains from becoming leading global drug formulators of generics and branded generics, diversifying the product offering to include human vaccines, attracting foreign clients through contract manufacturing (outsourcing) facilities and/or clinical trials or Contract Research and Manufacturing Services and limited drug discovery.

(Adapted from “A Health Check For A Better Future: Unleashing The Potential Of Pharmaceuticals in Pakistan, by Usman Khan, Nadia Mukhtar, Hina Shaikh and Abdul Hadi, published in May 2021, by The Pakistan Business Council and The Consortium for Development Policy Research)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, May 31st, 2021