I was under the impression that Black Swans were supposed to be rare. Rare enough to be effectively non-computable by standard methods. Nassim Taleb’s formulation of the Black Swan Theory is comprised of the three traits of: outlier (rarity), extreme impact, and retrospective predictability (i.e. 20/20 hindsight). I write this
“Our performance last month was 46.” Oh, you don’t have to thank me, I was just doing my job. Not very well, I might add. 46? 46 what? Or 46 who’s? Without context, 46 is just a number, just data. In context, perhaps that’s 46 out of 48 (not too
Quiz time. Just to see if you learned anything from the last go around. The “V”, by the way, could stand for “volatile”, as in the 2008-09 global economic meltdown, or perhaps “volcano”, as in the 2010 eruptions of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Did you have a Plan V for the
With the exception of the occasional James Bond movie that proves the rule, we don’t as a matter of course combine our modes of transportation into one all-purpose vehicle, and we even tend to park our cars, boats and planes in separate facilities. But when it comes to financial management,
My introduction to the issue of risk in business decision making came rather abruptly and rudely during what I thought was going to be another routine quarterly business review with the executive committee. My particular agenda item was to present the business case for a “lite” version of one of
Somewhat surprisingly, we all probably know what we mean when we use strategy as an adjective, “strategic”, but manage to make a complete muddle out of the word as a noun, “strategy”. Can our tactics be strategic? I would think yes, if they are in accordance with some strategy. Can
