The Goal Is Antifragile

Some of you may remember the book, “The Black Swan,” that I have written quite a few blogs on in the past. The reason I have shared from Nassim Taleb often is his philosophical thinking about the world and investing is so insightful and unique that it makes for serious contemplation about the world in which we live.antifragile_the_book

Well, Taleb has done it again. He has written a new book that is just starting to sink in and open my eyes to the implications of his thinking. The book is “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” Here Taleb presents to us that things will get more stable and stronger when they have ongoing shock and turmoil, compared to things that are breakable or fragile. That the antifragility of some comes at the expense of the fragility of others.

This happens in the biological world where some parts of the inside, like within a cell, may need to be fragile for the large structure to be antifragile. Taleb uses the example of restaurants in the book, saying that each one is fragile in that they come and go – they compete and go out of business regularly. The local restaurant collective is antifragile with its system providing quality, whereas central control, Soviet-style cafeteria food would be the alternative.

Fragile type systems depend on everything be exact and a planned course. If you have deviations, they are more harmful, so this needs to be more predictive in its approach. The opposite holds true for antifragile, where you don’t worry about deviations and the possible different outcomes that may occur as you move forward.

When you see the world through this lens, it helps put perspective on what works and doesn’t work. This would mean not bailing out on the things that don’t work, and not relying on permanent administrations and forecasting departments that think they can predict the future.

How do you help yourself to become more antifragile? You learn to love mistakes. When you make them a lot, but at a level that is small and reversible instead of large and destructive, you put yourself in a situation to evolve and stay alive. What you may consider is the random aspect of trial and error, is not so random if it is carried out in a rational approach, because the error is used as information.

For the entrepreneur out there, Taleb’s work has a lot of implications for your strategy and thinking in how you approach your competitors, market place and the world in which you live. I will get into that more in future blogs.

As I’m sure you have noticed, we have changed the blog over to a new format, so it will look a little different to you. Thanks for reading.




Can the Entrepreneur Optimism Be Risky?

 

As an entrepreneur, I consider myself a pretty optimistic person.  I look to the future and see a rosy picture filled with visions of a lifestyle that incorporates my dreams.  I will sacrifice now acknowledging that I will see better times ahead.  Knowing that the little steps of progress I see in my company is leading to something better really gets me excited, and the optimism overflows even more!  Have you ever thought this could be a little risky?  I didn’t, but let’s explore this some more.

When I was preparing for India, I knew I needed some good reading material to entertain me on the 24 hours of travel time I would have each way.  I went to Barnes & Noble fast and slowto search and came upon a really good book called “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman.    Daniel won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2002, and with this book he aimed to “improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgment and choice in others, and eventually in ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them.”

 I have found this book to be very interesting and mentally stimulating in the same vein that I did with “The Black Swan,” which you can read more about here on my blog.  I have not finished the entire book yet but was very intrigued with a chapter called “The Engine of Capitalism.”  Here, Daniel discusses the advantages of optimism and how it leads to happier, healthier, more resilient people.  The optimists are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, and the political and military leaders, which he points out are not the average people.  They get there by seeking challenges and taking risk.

Most interestingly, he discusses how an optimistic bias can blind an entrepreneur from seeing the full risk of an undertaking or the decisions they make.  In study after study, Daniel shows that optimistic people were not capable of predicting or generating the results they expected.  What do we do with this overconfident optimism?  Daniel suggests one option would be to do a “premortem,” and I see another option of firing “bullets.”

The premortem occurs when the organization has almost come to an important choice but still before the big decision.  They gather a group of people involved in the assessment, and they write a brief history imagining that they implemented the decision and it died, so now they have to imagine they are looking back and come up with reasons why it might have failed. Daniel says this does two things.  First, it overcomes group think when it appears a decision is moving forward.  Second, it opens up the floor for knowledgeable individuals to express their doubts when they may have been suppressed by the leader before.

I think there is another way to handle overconfident optimism, and that is to fire bullets, as Collins discussed in “Great by Choice.”  When you test the market reaction by looking for empirical evidence with small, low risk exposure (firing a bullet), your confidence comes from real world market feedback.  Only then do you fire the big cannon ball without worrying that your optimistic bias got in the way of a venture that could have been devastating to your company.

I know my over eager optimism has gotten in my way and has been costly. How are you managing yours?

Side note on the 4 Billion Customers’ blog last week:  I read David Meerman Scott’s blog this week, reinforcing the mobile expansion to all parts of the world.  He was in the jungles of Central America and experienced tribal people with no running water or electricity using mobile devices to better their world.  Check out his blog.

 




What’s so special about a Black Swan anyway?

Black Swan Theory is and why the book by Nassim Taleb is so relevant to both our personal and professional lives.

Fooled by Randomness. I was blown away by how he analyzed risk as a former Wall Street trader. Being a regular in the book store, I saw another one of Taleb’s books The Black Swan about 3 years ago and picked it up immediately. I was once more blown away, only this time at a new higher level.

The Black Swan? The reason is that for years it was man’s experience that swans only came in white. Then one day in Australia a black swan was discovered. This is significant because it illustrates how one event can change everything you ever thought you knew about something. It shows a limitation in our learning because we use observations that pile up over and over, then one event changes our entire reality. The impossible becomes possible.

Some examples of a Black Swan Event would be World War 1, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the October 87 stock market crash, the computer, Google, Harry Potter and the events of 9/11.

There are 3 attributes to a Black Swan:

more on The Black Swan coming soon…




What’s the Risk? The Black Swan vs. The Bell Curve

If you recall, I wrote a blog not too long ago on the Black Swan, with emphasis on its take of an Extremistan world, where living in a scalable world makes you subject to extreme events. With the recent movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, I’ve been thinking a lot about this theory, and about what caused the stock market crash. Was it really because of the greedy types on Wall Street?

A big portion of the Black Swan is on how the Gaussian bell curve can measure risk in a world not subject to extreme fluctuations, but it doesn’t come close to measuring the risk that is associated with things that can range more than 3 standard deviations from the mean. Things such as wealth, stocks, bonds, book sales, movies, or CD’s are an example of this.

Since Wall Street uses this form of measurement to analyze risk, they gave everyone that warm and fuzzy feeling when thinking about how much loss they were exposed to. In reality, an extreme black swan event blew out all of their ability to measure the risk they were taking, causing all the major investment banks to push their existence to the edge, and not all survived.

This seems to me to be a much better explanation of what happened than one that blames all of the Wall Street players for being too greedy. If this was so, why would so many people jeopardize their careers and livelihood, all just to make more money?

Having been part of the investment world for over 20 years, and associating with the Wall Street players, I don’t feel that this is a plausible excuse. It would seem from an observation stand point that no matter what the income level, people are always striving to do better. Do you remember thinking that if you could only get to $25,000/year, everything would be great? Then when you got there, suddenly all it took was $50,000/year for everything to be great? Then $100,000…and so on, and so on.

If making a lot of money makes you greedy, then what about Bill Gates or Oprah? Have you seen Google or Intel’s earnings and revenue lately? In the last quarter, Google made 2.2 Billion, Microsoft’s profits are up 51%, and the late, great superstar Michael Jackson…he made 250 Million, which Forbes claims to be more than any living celebrity superstar. Does greed extend to the afterlife?

Does Wall Street, just like tech companies, writers, producers, or musicians, make lots of money because they live in the scalable world of the Black Swan rather than because they are greedy?
So what does this mean to you if you are trying to grow a business? The model of reality that you use is important in understanding the risk that you are taking. Depending on if you live in a scalable or non-scalable world, the risk that you are taking may not be what you think it is.




Welcome to Extremistan, Land of the Black Swan…

After the last blog post one of our project managers, Taryn, asked me “If you can’t predict a Black Swan, then how do you stay away from the negative ones, and vice versa, how do you put yourself in the path of positive ones?”

To answer this question, you have to understand the two types of environments that exist in the world of the Black Swan. Taleb calls them Mediocristan and Extremistan, and they are defined as:

Mediocristan …”When your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or the total. The largest observation will remain impressive, but eventually insignificant, to the sum.” (p.32, The Black Swan)

Another way to look at this is non-scalable types of events. Examples are those such as a person’s weight and height, or the non scalable income of a baker, beautician, or a massage therapist. You don’t grow 6 inches or gain 100 pounds in a day…and careers where a standard amount of money is exchanged per transaction are Mediocristan, and don’t subject you to a Black Swan event.

Extremistan…”Inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate or the total.”(p.33, The Black Swan) This is a scalable event like wealth, book sales, planet size, and financial markets. Also in this environment, a few can take all the winnings, or a negative might totally wipe you out. The banking losses from the 1982 banking crisis wiped out all the collective profits made by banks in the past 200 years. In Extremistan you are subject to a Black Swan.

What all this means is that, when you know the environment that you are living in and if it is subject to a non-scalable or scalable event, you will know the potential of the risk. If your work is like an orthodontist (non-scalable), you can make a nice living over a long period of time, but no single day will dramatically change your income total. If you are an author (scalable), the masses end up working 2nd jobs while a few will experience Black Swan events like J.K. Rowling.

Our software company makes most of its money from building custom software products for clients, a non-scalable income. About 20% of our efforts, however, are spent building products that we put out in the market place. This is scalable and subjects us to a positive Black Swan if they were to go viral. This is a controlled way to manage for a positive Black Swan.

Now you know what a Black Swan is…it’s time to figure out if you’re living in Mediocristan or Extremistan. If you’re living in Extremistan…what can you do to move away from the negative Black Swans and put yourself in the path of a positive one?