Meanwhile, strategy scholars were also amongst the heap of academics ridiculed in the book. Here’s Taleb on his MBA experience:

When I was in business school I rarely attended lectures in something called strategic planning, a required course, and when I showed my face in class, I did not listen for a nanosecond to what was said there; did not even buy the books. There is something about the common sense of student culture; we knew that it was all babble. I passed the required classes in management by confusing the professors, playing with complicated logic…

He does thankfully recognize that strategy scholars themselves have noted the planning problem in existing work e.g., he cites Bill Starbuck’s work – but that argument goes back to Alchian, 1950 etc.

Taleb then goes on to say:

Almost everything theoretical in management, from Taylorism to all productivity stories, upon empirical testing, has been exposed as pseudoscience.

Cute. I love any argument that in wholesale fashion dismisses a field like that. Is there pseudoscience in management? No question. There is in any field. And the field of management might even have a disproportionate share of pseudoscience in it. But the whole book is characterized by those types of glib dismissals very few are spared, which then makes it hard to evaluate anything novel that Taleb himself might have to say.

via Nassim Taleb, the Angry Version of Malcolm Gladwell « StrategyProfs.net.

Taleb says the restaurant and airline industries are good examples of antifragile systems: The death of a specific company doesn’t affect the whole industry. The industry as a whole learns from the company’s mistakes and improves.

“The airline industry is set up in such a way as to make travel safer after every plane crash,” he wrote in a recent newspaper piece.

Similarly, when individual restaurants fail, the industry as a whole learns and grows from the experience. “The collective enterprise benefits from the fragility of the individual components,” says Taleb.

The opposite is true of the financial industry, Taleb says: Dominated by companies so large that their failure would bring down the entire economy, they were unable to adapt. Yet, Taleb notes ruefully, many of the men and women who ran failed companies walked away in 2008 with millions in their pockets.

“At no time in the history of humankind have more positions of power been assigned to people who don’t take personal risks,” he writes. Corporate leaders, he insists, ought to flourish or fail according to – not despite – their company’s performance and health.

Antifragile asks a great deal of us: to embrace the idea that we live in a world shot through with uncertainty. Its lessons, Taleb insists, aren’t useful only in the corporate world, but translate into an existential plan for individual living.

“The question we need to ask,” he says, “is how to live in a world we don’t understand.”

via He’d have us embrace change and uncertainty.

Taleb can write so originally in part because he has such a different background than the typical authors of these sorts of books. He isn’t involved in academia except at the peripheral level and he left big-company-land many years ago. Neither is he a journalist under pressure to publish. He has the money and motivation to just think and read and talk to people he wants to and tell us what he has learnt. This seems to be all he wants to do.

His originality probably owes as much to his being a born contrarian. He likes to be clear about who and what he loves and hates. He seems, for example, to really like Brooklyn, given how often he uses Brooklyn-type characters and locutions to make his points. I do, too- —and would agree that Brooklyn is as good a place as Singapore to make the case for antifragility. In the “hate” category fall economists, traders, pundits of all kinds, central planners—and a little more generally, people from Harvard. Apologies to my hosts here! I have the powerful sense that he welcomes all comers.

via Nassim Taleb’s Cure for Fragility – Larry Prusak – Harvard Business Review.

New from NNT”s homepage.

Book Reviews that summarize the idea: Long Wall Street Journal Essay (limted to policy applications, without the fun/personal part), TIMES , ECONOMIST (error: like a bodybuilder should read “like a butcher”), FT, Emotional & touching review, The 2nd most stupid reviewer I’ve had in 1041 attacks David Runciman, a direct counter by Matt Ridley in the WSJ.

via Nassim N. Taleb Home & Professional Page.