Explain It Clearly

  THE THIRD PEG THEORY™ Serious history. Slightly relaxed. No pretending. When Kings Became Influencers Not about monarchs. About legitimacy becoming performance. By: Manish Kumar , Founder & Editor, Explain It Clearly There was a time when being king was a remarkably straightforward profession. You were born into the correct family, inherited the correct castle, defeated the incorrect relatives, received the appropriate blessing from the appropriate religious authority and spent the remainder of your career being addressed as “Your Majesty” by people who understood that unemployment was preferable to treason but treason was preferable to arguing with the tax collector. Nobody asked whether the king was relatable. Nobody expected him to post twice a day. Nobody cared about his engagement rate. The king did not need followers. He had subjects. And subjects, historically speaking, were...

  THE THIRD PEG THEORY™ Serious history. Slightly relaxed. No pretending. A Weekend Column by Manish Kumar The World's Most Dangerous Meeting Was Probably Very Well Catered Not about food. About diplomacy. Wars are usually remembered for the people who fought them. Diplomacy is remembered for the people who sat down afterward and discovered that somebody had to decide what the fighting had actually achieved. Some of history's most dangerous rooms therefore looked remarkably harmless. There were tables. Chairs. Flags. Maps. Men in excellent suits. Women in excellent dresses, when women were permitted anywhere near the negotiating table. There were translators, aides, photographers, handwritten notes and, very often, dinner. The catering was probably excellent. The consequences were not. Civilization has always had a peculiar habit ...

  THE THIRD PEG THEORY™ Serious history. Slightly relaxed. No pretending. A Weekend Column by Manish Kumar The World's Oldest Startup Never Raised Funding Every startup eventually asks the same uncomfortable question: What happens when the founder leaves? Humanity has been answering that question for several thousand years. Usually badly. Occasionally brilliantly. And sometimes by inventing a bureaucracy so complicated that nobody can find the founder anymore. Modern business has developed an impressive vocabulary for organisational survival: founder dependency, scalability, recurring revenue, distribution, network effects, institutional memory, succession planning and brand identity. History had most of these things before PowerPoint. It simply had the good manners not to put them in a pitch deck. Take the Catholic Church. It has survived empires, ...

A brief history of how an ordinary Tuesday became transformational There was a time when something happened at school and people simply described what had happened. A child asked a question. A teacher answered it. Students played football. A parent came to discuss admissions. A school invited some visitors to dinner. People went home. It was not that education was less thoughtful in those days. Quite the opposite. Teachers, philosophers and educational reformers had been thinking seriously about learning for centuries. Socrates asked questions. Plato thought about education. Rousseau challenged the assumptions of his time. Montessori changed the relationship between the child, the teacher and the environment. John Dewey spent a considerable portion of his life explaining why education should be connected to experience rather than merely memorising information. They had theories. They had arguments. They had disagreements. What they did not have was LinkedIn. This turned out to be impor...