Month: September 2010

What’s Missing From This List?

by

An online poll is making the rounds.

How long you will live.
How much money you will make in your lifetime.
The NAME of the person best suited to you.
How happy you will be compared to the average human.
What profession you will spend most of your life doing.
Where will you live for most of your life.
How many children you will have.
How you will die.

Professor Bainbridge points out that the site originating the poll seems to be directed at a younger audience and the constraints of the thought experiment make the questions inherently personal.

Even so, don’t these questions seem tremendously self-centered?

Read more

Black Swan

by

Thom Yorke wrote a song called “Black Swan” that resonated with me in terms of the financial crisis of 2008-2009 (and today) commonly called “The Great Recession”. He wrote the song in 2006.

The “Black Swan” was a metaphor used by Taleb in his excellent book “Fooled by Randomness“. The point of that book (broadly stated) is that people under estimate randomness and long-tail events; Taleb is an options trader specializing in the valuation of far-out-of-the-money options and whether or not they are fairly priced. The metaphor specifically for the Black Swan is that no one ever anticipated that there was a black swan; all swans were expected to be white and it would be viewed as a very remote or unanticipated event if a “black” swan were to turn up.  When settlers reached Australia, however, they were surprised to find black swans, meaning that they had significantly under-estimated the probability of this event occurring.

While you can’t directly tie art to a particular business concept I liked the part of being “ground in the bitumen” and then general feeling of being lost and angst that is summarized as “this is f*cked up, f*cked up”.

Read more

On the Anglosphere

by

The Indian Question dominated a fascinating conference on the Anglosphere in Winchester yesterday, co-hosted by two of the greatest conservative editors on the planet: Daniel Johnson of Prospect, and Roger Kimball of The New Criterion. Some of the cleverest and most contrarian men in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India were present.

And

James Bennett, who more or less invented the Anglosphere, saw India as the key. While it might be awkward to talk of a nation of 1.3 billion people “joining” a club of 400 million, the orientation of India would determine the relative power of the English-speaking democracies for the rest of the century.

– Daniel Hannan, Telegraph blogs

There has been a fair amount of negative press recently for Team India because of the Commonwealth Games. Kashmir is everywhere in the news, too. We shall see.

Update: I am using “Team India” in the way that the press often refers to the “Team India versus Team China” rivalry. Personally, I’m a little more worried about Team America’s recent play. I’m sure we’ll right it eventually. I firmly believe that.

Hope for those trying to make a Difference in a Bureaucracy

by

My experience in business has been in bureaucracies of various stripes since I left college a couple of decades ago. If you have ever worked in a bureaucracy, you know how difficult it can be to get something accomplished, especially when everyone else seems to be heads-down and avoiding risk. In the simplest of terms, to accomplish anything, you need to continuously have cantankerous meetings, to push your agenda, and to take flak from everyone about what might go wrong with your approach. It seems so much easier just to “go with the flow” and take a low profile, just like everyone else.

On a parallel vein, there are many different ways to approach a career. One way is to bargain furiously for the highest position possible when you enter a job, and then to focus continually on getting promoted and working the organization politically for continued promotion. The individuals who push down this path are often focused upwards on presenting their efforts in the best light and in ensuring that the areas in which they work are the most promising in terms of opportunities for promotion (i.e. highly visible to executives). This can be a very effective strategy.

Another, opposite sort of approach is to work hard and take on some of the most difficult tasks that the organization faces, and try to do your best to make the firm better even if the choices are not politically popular. If you see a project that is in disarray and you step in to try to make it better, that can be a dangerous move politically (because if it fails, it could get pinned on you) but it could be the best move for the company, because it gives a project the chance to right itself. If you see a process that is inefficient but crosses a lot of organizational silos, meaning that it will be difficult to streamline and get everyone on the same page, this is also the type of effort that the heads-down hardworking type will apply themselves to.

In many instances it seems that the hardworking, change-agent type of person is kind of “playing the fool” by working so hard while the career-orientated politically minded person is looking at the overall picture and trying to pick the project that will give him or her the most visibility and opportunities for career gain.

Read more