Tag Archives: Black Swans

Blaise Pascal and the Somali Pirates

Are we confident that our processes are delivering to the right quality and compliance requirements? How did we decide what the right controls, checks and balances are? Do we build in a safety margin or pay for insurance because we might fail? After all, failure has consequences, and insurance and safety cushions can be costly.
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“Good, or Got Lucky?”

“To the victor belongs the spoils” is the famous quote by New York Senator William Learned Marcy (1786-1857), recited in the U. S. Senate, 25 January 1832. This one sure gets lots of traffic. It brings with it a lot of imagery of the uglier side of politics, graft and an all or nothing perspective. I can recall, as I read world history in high school, images of conquerors doing all the pillaging and other stuff. Certainly, the principle still has legs today, ugly legs at that.

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This is Not What I Expected!

Planning has lots of meanings. Often, planning is a bridge between intent and action. That means once we want to accomplish something, get somewhere, achieve a goal, make a number, change, transform, grow, shrink, acquire, dispose, win, or a myriad of end states, we spend time some effort wrestling with the how to (plan) achieve the aforementioned intent (vision). The vision is described with adjectives and nouns, but the plan needs verbs to have any useful meaning. If the vision is big and farther out than the budget, the plan is often called strategic. If the vision looks out as far as the budget, the plan is often called business. The vision creates provide promise and the plan provides confidence to achieve the promise. Planning is getting harder to do.

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On the Shoulders of Giants

I’ve often heard the term, “You are what you eat.” I suspect that some of that may be true. If you’ve read Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” you may conclude that we are more corn than anything else.
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Mean Times

We like symmetry. Most of us do. There is something in our wiring or programming that finds symmetry attractive, pleasing, and embodying some balance that might actually communicate harmony. We see it in the YinYang and the Taoist philosophy. We often characterize justice as a balanced scale, and countless studies have measured our perceptions of beauty among individuals and found facial symmetry the driving attractiveness variable. When we measure and analyze to find meaning in data, there is also an underlying “hope” that we find symmetry. When we see a “normal” distribution, or bell curve, we enter a comfort zone. In fact, I know countless people who work terribly hard at converting data that is not symmetric or normal into a set that is. Some, actually too many, take out data that does not fit the beauty of symmetry, proceed to insult it with names like outliers and dismiss them from our view.
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“Band of Brothers”

A must read chapter is “Battle of the Nile.” For me, it resonates with the importance of knowing your competition and your real estate (where you are competing), planning, innovation, and most of all, empowering your team to win. It also serves as a vivid example of how much the rigid controls of an adversary created wonderful opportunities for execution with agility and surprise.
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“Once Upon a Time … and Then They Lived Happily Ever After”

“Once Upon a Time … and Then They Lived Happily Ever After”
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Felix the Cat

How often do we use our nostalgia magic bag? It’s the one where we keep our memories and trusted well-worn tools, similar to Felix the Cat’s bag of tricks. Like Felix, when he gets in a fix, we face problems …
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“If I Had a Hammer, I Would Hammer in the Morning, …”

“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  This quote is attributed to Mark Twain (and a few others, including Abraham Maslow).  When I first heard the phrase, it was also quoted as a Japanese proverb and …
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Does anybody have a nail?

Ever wonder how much impact decisions and choices have? Call it Chaos Theory or the Butterfly Effect, as time’s arrow moves forward, each event is a fork in the road. In our enterprises, these forks precipitate a cascade of events …
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