“An expert is one who does the wrong things for the most sophisticated of reasons.”
Few Sales Directors and Sales executives would claim
if asked to submit a forecast that they were experts at forecasting.
We are all trying to
learn how to sell in a VUCA world . (Volatile, Uncertain , Complex and Ambiguous.)
That makes forecasting increasingly harder as well as important.
Nassim Nicholas
Taleb author of the bestseller ‘The Black Swan’ is a specialist in risk engineering. He says
“ We can’t predict very accurately.
We can’t forecast things.
There is a high degree of unpredictability”
Professor Taleb describes Expert problems (in
which the expert knows a lot but less than he thinks he does) often bring
fragilities, and acceptance of ignorance the reverse.”.
“There are secrets to
our world,” he writes, “that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or
analysis will ever capture in full.”
Some things in
business hate volatility some things love it.
The more I get to
understand his philosophy I think it means we in Sales need to be Antifagilistas which sounds like a band of
undercover business guerrilla operatives
out in the VUCA jungle.
We need to be brave and learn how to embrace the chaos.
Uncertainty -The Science bit ( a bit
of diversion)
( if Science is not
your thing scroll down to 'back to Prof Taleb ' -I am not sure Science was my thing )
My first intellectual struggles with 'Unpredictability' came
from wrestling with the challenges of undergraduate Chemistry in the 1980s.
The theory
responsible for my dis-ease, was from the thoughts of one Herr Werner
Heisenberg 1927 .The ‘Uncertainty Principle’ followed by work
by Kennard and Weyl in 1928 .
Probably today’s primary school children do this stuff in an afternoon now for all I
know !
I found it tough going
Anyhow it went something like
I found it tough going
Anyhow it went something like
The more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less
precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. There was also a thing called Planck’s constant which I think I was a thick as ! :)
Then there was Schrodinger's Cat- the famous thought experiment that
illustrates the paradox of quantum mechanics when applied to everyday objects I
wish this New Scientist video Click for video had been around when I was at College.
Scientists wrestle with Uncertainty then but so do Philosophers let's get back to Prof. Taleb
Scientists wrestle with Uncertainty then but so do Philosophers let's get back to Prof. Taleb
Back to Prof Taleb
One of the leading experts in Unpredictability is Professor
Taleb a risk engineer at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. His best
selling book on how unpredictable events influence our world was The Black Swan
Question : What’s the opposite of fragile?
One might answer robust, resilient, solid or strong.
Prof Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues these are inaccurate.
The opposite of
fragile , would be a mail package on which one would write “ Please mishandle”
The opposite of something is not neutral or zero it is positive.
Some things benefit from being mishandled randomly knocked
shocked and banged
I know it when I ‘tap’
my computer in frustration !
Prof Taleb’s point is that emergencies or problems can often
lead to a new idea.
For example :- The airline industry benefits from every
mistake ever made on the planet. Any pilot who makes a mistake on the planet today makes your next flight safer.
The banking industry is the opposite. Every mistake takes
the banking system closer to a total collapse.
One system is ‘antifragile’ one while the other is ‘fragile’.
The banking system was built for order and not for the
unpredictable. It was very fragile and people were hiding risk.
So which are you a
Fragilista ? Robustilista ? or Antifragilista ?
“No skin in the game” can lead to
One of the problems is that investors and bankers too often
had no personal risk from their actions
If they wave all the upsides and none of the downsides the
system becomes very fragile.
The banking system in 2012 paid itself large bonuses in the
history of banking and that was from taxpayers. Bankers have hijacked the
system and people think that’s capitalism.
Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their
mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes. The only way you can
have a system that’s robust is when people are punished for their mistakes.
Maybe the professor is correct.
The FT wrote a supportive
review The Guardian was rather less taken with it and him.
For me Taleb is good at
shaking up my brains.
Here are some statistics I gleaned from the really useful
.City A.M. on line version which m gets across Taleb’s ‘skin in the game point’
·
More than 80% of all workers in the Financial
Services Industry expect a bonus for 2012. Almost half expect their bonus to be
larger than last year’s.
·
The total cost of bailing out the British
Banking system was £1.3 trillion more
than 10 times the budget of the National Health
·
Taxpayer paid out £45 billion shares in the
Royal Bank of Scotland, £20 billion in Lloyds
PERHAPS!
PERHAPS! PERHAPS!
If we in Sales can’t 'make our mind up about 'Taleb’s notions'
then we’ll never get started' or as Doris Day
sang Click here for Delightful Doris
Perhaps Schrodinger’s cat is 'on a hot tin roof'
in a state of extreme anxiousness.
Perhaps for some Taleb’s Black Swan is cooked or
Perhaps more in Sales should read Taleb and join the Talebantifragilistas
today!
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