Anirban Chatterjee Insights

First in a series I carry two perfumes now. I choose between them the way I choose a socks — quickly, without thinking, the way a habit is supposed to work. Our house has a room freshener too. Some lemon-and-something scent that a can promises will last for weeks. It does its job. I press the nozzle, a fine mist settles over the room, and for a few hours the air smells like nothing in particular. Pleasant. Forgettable. I did not grow up like this. For twenty four years, the w

If you've ever wondered how China went from "world's factory" to "world's innovation lab" in barely a decade, this WEF piece by Kaiser Kuo lays out the whole playbook, and it does it without drowning you in jargon. The writing has that explainer feel, more journalist than policy wonk, which makes a genuinely complex topic like industrial strategy actually digestible. Here's what stood out: The numbers do the talking. China now controls over 75% of global lithium-ion battery m

If you like data with your morning coffee, this one's got plenty. It's OECD's big annual report on jobs, and this year's twist is regional inequality, meaning where you live shapes your job prospects more than most people assume. The tone is very "we have read a thousand spreadsheets and we hare tired," which is honestly refreshing. No hype, no jargon for jargon's sake, just findings backed by numbers. Here's what stood out, with the actual figures: Employment across the 38 O

Most of us have been sold a comforting story about AI at work: humans and machines together will always outperform either one alone. It is a reassuring idea. It is also, according to MIT researchers, largely wrong. Brian Eastwood's piece for MIT Sloan Ideas Made to Matter summarises a genuinely important study. The writing is clean and structured, the kind of no-frills science communication MIT Sloan does well. It does not oversell the findings. Refreshingly, it leads with th

Picture this. A CEO has just spent eighteen months and a considerable amount of money rolling out a new operational excellence programme. Training completed. Audits passed. Compliance rates above eighty percent. Everyone nodded in the right meetings. Six months later the numbers have barely moved and nobody can quite explain why. This paper explains why. And it does so with the kind of quiet confidence that only comes from having seen the same failure play out across hundreds

Most articles about biodiversity make you feel guilty within the first two paragraphs and completely overwhelmed by the third. This one does something different. It makes you feel like you are finally being let in on something important that nobody ever bothered to explain properly. What draws you in immediately is the tone. This is not a lecture. It reads more like a conversation with someone who genuinely loves this subject and cannot believe more people are not talking abo