Ukraine’s army is struggling to find good recruits - The Economist   

THE NEW recruits came from a variety of backgrounds, but they shared one thing: after rudimentary training in western Europe, none of them expected to be deployed to an assault unit at the hottest section of the Ukrainian front line. Some had signed up voluntarily, expecting to be given places in units that suited their profiles: as drone operators or artillery men. Others were plucked from their villages with little warning. One older recruit didn’t even have the chance to pick up his false teeth. After less than a week in the trenches of the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, the platoon of 20 had been reduced by six. Three had been killed in action, three seriously wounded.

This is one of the worst recruitment stories, but it is far from isolated. Ukraine is desperately looking to plug its front lines against new Russian attacks. No army offers new recruits guarantees about where they will be deployed, let alone in wartime, and the assault brigades are among the most desperate units.

But what lawyers describe as a “deployment lottery” is straining the recruitment process. Army chiefs are struggling to fill places with the willing; some are resorting to conscription raids on gyms and shopping centres. Few of those who are signed up this way make good soldiers. “We’re seeing 45- to 47-year-olds,” complains one senior officer. “They are out of breath by the time they reach the front line.”

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How to master the art of delegation - The Economist   

Delegating well is the six-pack of management: widely desired and harder to achieve the older you get. In theory, handing appropriate decisions off to people lower down the corporate ladder means greater satisfaction all round. Bosses get more time to concentrate on the issues that really deserve their attention. Middle managers and workers enjoy a greater sense of autonomy. And the organisation benefits from faster decision-making on the part of people who are better informed about the matter at hand. In practice, however, delegation is a minefield.

Some bosses do not even try to delegate. They may mistrust people below them or crave control. Their career success may simply have persuaded them of their own genius. But there are kinder explanations, too. Startup founders are conditioned to do everything, at least until firms get to a certain size. Plenty of managers shoulder more work than they should in order to protect their teams from overload.

Other managers do delegate but they do so for the wrong reasons. Studies suggest that people are likely to hand off decisions when choices are hard, when the consequences affect others and when they want to avoid being blamed for a bad outcome. In a paper from 2016 by Mary Steffel of Northeastern University and her co-authors, volunteers were told that they had to book hotel rooms at a conference, either for their own use or for their boss, and asked them if they would like to reserve the rooms themselves or delegate the task to an office manager. When they were choosing for the boss and the hotels were ropey, people were more likely to pass the job to the hapless office manager.

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Will TikTok’s GoTo gambit save its Indonesian business? - The Economist   

The more the world’s youngsters love TikTok’s viral videos, the more their elected elders hate the app. They decry it for supposedly corroding young minds and, worse, for its links to China, home to its parent company, ByteDance. Many in America want to ban it. India already has. In October Indonesia, another big and promising market, shut down TikTok’s fledgling but lucrative sideline of selling goods via its videos, by requiring social-media firms to obtain an e-commerce licence—with no guarantee of success.

Such obstacles have forced TikTok to act strategically, for instance by moving its global headquarters to Singapore and hiring a Singaporean chief executive, which has put distance between it and its Chinese parent. In another canny move, on December 11th it announced that it was paying $840m for a 75% stake in Tokopedia, the e-commerce arm of GoTo, an Indonesian tech conglomerate. It has also pledged to invest $1.5bn in the tie-up.

The deal is something of a shotgun marriage, but it benefits both sides. GoTo, which has struggled to turn a profit in recent years, will no longer need to subsidise its loss-making retail arm. TikTok, for its part, will be allowed to restart its e-commerce operations. Sales on TikTok’s app will be fulfilled by Tokopedia’s logistics network (though, like all e-merchants in Indonesia, it must now charge minimum prices for products made abroad).

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Some thought covid would change literature. It has not - The Economist   

The Vulnerables. By Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books; 256 pages; $29.99. To be published in Britain by Virago in January; £16.99

When the world entered lockdowns for covid in 2020, writers and critics, finding themselves with even more time on their hands than usual, wondered how the pandemic would affect fiction. Since the “Iliad”, literature has documented—and been shaped by—disease, including Daniel Defoe’s semi-fictional testimony of London during the pestilence of 1655, “A Journal of the Plague Year” (1722), and Albert Camus’s imagining of a cholera outbreak in a French-controlled Algerian city, “The Plague” (1947). Who would write the first great pandemic novel of the covid era?

Two of America’s most distinguished novelists, Michael Cunningham and Sigrid Nunez, have published novels that try to carry this mantle. Despite their new subject matter, however, these books do not break literary ground. Covid did not, as some had predicted, permanently change the way people lived. As fear of the virus ebbed, they snapped back to old habits. The same is proving true for fiction.

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