I’ve written a few times about Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan. It’s one of those seminal books that everyone should read, or certainly be aware of the basic ideas that Taleb writes about. It manages to be both scholarly and readable and its implications are far wider than just “business”.
A few weeks back, I wrote about getAbstract, who specialise in summarising leading business books into just 5 pages and how they do this remarkably well. When they asked me to choose an abstract to make available to MobHappy readers for free, The Black Swan sprang immediately to mind. I hope you enjoy it - the link will only work for a month, so click here now to download the PDF.
Now when I whitter on about Black Swans, you’ll know what I really mean. Many thanks to getAbstract for making this available to MobHappy readers.
excellent. wanted to read this for ages. need about a year off to catch up with all the books i’d like to read. This will make a very helpful dent.
Tops. Right. I’ve read it now and passed it on. Similar ideas can be found in The Origin of Wealth, which I’m STILL working my way through. Truly great book but one I’m having to take a little at a time.
Very thought provoking and I’ve often given much thought to the debate of luck vs. applied skill in determining success. Absolutely agree that Black Swans trigger significant changes but I still can’t reconcile this with the cycles that seem to determine the ebb and flow of so much of our socio-cultural-economic fabric.
Take the property boom for example; looking back now we can see that property tends to fluctuate with the now well known eighteen year economic cycle. We also know, from historical evidence, that Black Swans eventually trigger inevitable dips into an economic trough. The sub-prime crisis will likely be the ‘Black Swan’ for the forthcoming recession. This suggests to me that these cycles may not be triggered by random events - we only point to random events as causation. I’ve often thought that perhaps these ‘cycles’ - rather than chance events that seem to trigger them - are far more important in determining economic progress at a global, country and even individual level?
I don’t know enough about economics and statistics to make any kind of reasonable argument here, but perhaps the fate of entrepreneurs starting out on the lonely yet exhilarating road towards ’startup success’ is in the hands of yet unidentified cycles that determine how many, who and where the entrepreneurial winners are? If cycles determine how much money we have in our pockets, what houses we buy, what books we read and what clothes we wear - then why shouldn’t they determine which start-ups succeed? Sure, there are a million variables that will determine this success - but I suspect Google’s Black Swan is the simple decision not to carry heavy, slow display ads from day one. But maybe a ‘cycle’ was at work here and Google would have succeeded irrespective of this Black Swan event; what I mean to say is that even if the decision not to carry display ads was not their Black Swan then another would have triggered the same success anyway. The ‘cycle’ was simply kind to them in 1998.
Or maybe I’ve had a little too much coffee this morning…
Chris, Aerodeon
thank you getAbstract & mobhappy! nice service and interesting thoughts.