Risk is the bet. Uncertainty is whether or not to take the bet. In case you’re not a poker fan: it is 5 Card Draw, you hold 4-5-6-8-K, you should generally not call a bet discard the King, and then draw a card hoping to get a 7. You have a 1 in 11 chance of making an…
Q. What does Sophia, the robot granted Saudi “citizenship,” have in common with the Velveteen Rabbit? A. Neither are “real,” nor do they have the possibility of being so. Admittedly, I have sympathy for The Velveteen Rabbit the central character in a children’s book written by Margery Williams. It’s about a stuffed rabbit and his desire to…
Does your office have a copy machine? Better question: Did your office have a copy machine that was recently junked or sold for salvage? Or maybe your lease ran out and you were upsold for a newer model? Did you erase the hard drive? Digital copiers are computers. Everything you copy on a digital copy…
McDonald’s & Coca-Cola –– two of the most well known and respected brands in the world – do a promotion in Japan. They give away 10,000 USB-stick MP 3 players. It’s loaded with 10 free songs and 1 free virus,the QQPass Trojan. Plug it into your computer and it starts logging keystrokes, collecting passwords, gathering personal…
The ISIS attack in Paris caused me to resurrect a paper I originally wrote for Rudy Giuliani’s Homeland Security Team in 2006. It introduced “resilience” into the presidential primaries…I added a couple of updates to make it more timely… Terrorism is a battle for the mind. If ISIS falters, if it experiences defeats and appears to…
“What the hell is integral awareness?” Ask McLuhan. He figured it out 50 years ago. He also predicted the Internet, the Global Village and Facebook years before they were launched. Let me introduce Marshal McLuhan. He was an icon of the 1960’s; a pioneer in media studies. Wired credits McLuhan with envisioning the “global village”…
On this the 71st anniversary of the World War II D-Day invasion it is only fitting to remind ourselves that rarely do things go as planned in battle. The 18th century military strategist Carl Von Clausewitz called it the “fog of war.” It must have been pretty foggy on the night of June 5th and…
A pathology can be thought of as a deviation from a normal, healthy condition. In a real sense pathology is the antithesis of sustainability or resilience. Ironically, there are pathologies associated with sustainability and resilience programs…programs that have turned out worse after we’ve gotten our hands on them. We are incessant meddlers, in both man-made and natural systems. And sometimes…
Several years ago a colleague asked me a simple question: “Think about how your work might help business leaders to better understand their environment.” I took a couple of days and sent him a brief letter and paper. (I haven’t written anything on Prologue for almost 4 years. Maybe this will break the dry spell.…
Today’s “Gremlins” — Complexity & Uncertainty Consider an airline that has fine tuned its daily flight schedule and passenger seat pricing with yield management techniques. The strategy is set to optimize asset deployment and return on investment for a flight. And that works very well until the system becomes destabilized . One or more planes become inoperable…
Operation Orchard – Syria is about to go nuclear, then somebody turned off the air defense radar & Israeli jets are inbound to target. This is September 6, 2007, not all that long ago. One moment the reactor is there, the next moment a hole in the desert. Go figure! Is it just coincidence that…
They got it wrong. Internal Auditor published an article by Neil Baker “Managing the Complexity of Risk” claiming that “The ISO 31000 framework aims to provide a foundation for effective risk management within the organization.” Well….not so fast. “Complexity” has become something of a buzz word in today’s business culture. But I think our understanding…
“Due to the systemic nature of emerging risk, and the severe potential impact of such events, companies with slight advantages in detecting and managing emerging risks can obtain significant competitive opportunities.” Accenture, 2011. Accenture is actually talking about Brian Arthur’s Law of Increasing Return[1] (although it is doubtful they are aware of this) where a tiny advantage…
Okay, I poke fun at the rising elite of consulting, i.e. those involved with predictive analytics or “the revolution in analytics.” Yet it raises serious issues around the capabilities and limitations of certain kinds of analytical modeling. I am, by the way, a “fan” of quantitative methods …so keep smiling kick back and have a Corona. The…
Film of new born wolf pups at a Wolf Sanctuary not far from my home. Only 42 Mexican gray wolves are living outside captivity in New Mexico and Arizona. The pups add a significant promise to the recovery of a species once considered extinct in the wild. Young people need to come face-to-face with sustainability in nature. …
In Greek drama the prologue was a device that explained the context of the play to the audience, introducing themes, background and relationships that they were about to see unfold.
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The world is confronted by serious challenges that we must all address. The time has come for serious thinking, for serious ideas and for summoning the courage to act on them. If we do not change, we will diminish.
There is no progressive or gradient form of warfare; there are only armies who fight that way.
a blog on the social studies of finance
Just an average guy reviewing equipment for average guys (and gals).
You MAY model, manage or mitigate aspects of risk...but you MUST prepare for uncertainty!
My quest on self-organization and online collaborative spaces
Prologue 