hello delight

Early in the 1980s, Wall Street started hiring physicists, mathematicians, and engineers en masse.  Believing there were subtle inefficiencies in the market, these high-brain powered individuals could find them and make nickels, billions of times.  The existing practitioners of the day didn't have the type of skill to thrive in this new economy with this type of innovation.

Decades, and many bubbles later, we're discovering some of this black math wasn't as valuable as billed.

But this is a classic bath water vs. baby discussion.  Was the problem the influence of new skills used inappropriately or misalignment of incentives?  I will not try to answer that today, or ever, but I think the parallels are not dissimilar to what's happening on the web today. 

In classic "probably shouldn't publish an opinion on something this intricate, consequential, and complex" style, I commented on Taylor Davidison's blog about the importance, and value, of bringing one's heart to work.

Me, I'm barely an armchair psychologist yet throughout my career I've developed loads of theories on employee motivation.  Perhaps worse, I've tested these theories out in a net-free lab environments on many unsuspecting participants.  Now, I publish these amateur theories for the world to see.

Hello, Mr. Internet, glad you're here.

This isn't all that different than when the physicists first went to Wall St.  They were traditional science school guys impinging on b-school territories.  The thinking went that the industry needed to innovate beyond b-schoolers.  What it needed, was mass collaboration.  Maybe 1987, 2000, and 2008 suggest that wasn't such a good idea.

While lots of things are different about mass collaboration today, lots of things are the same.  At a minimum, scale is easier to achieve today. The scale is only possible because of the web.  Like lots of other systems, the strength (eg self-policing due to scale) is also its weakness.  As folks like me crowd the airwaves with untested, unproven noise, detecting the signal becomes very difficult. 

Only time will tell if this new era of mass collaboration we're entering can be structured and is a net positive or negative.  Hopefully, it's not my generations portfolio insurance.

Business school courses look for any opportunity to teach from Sun Tzu's The Art of War.  It's a beautiful framework for ethical competitive strategy.  I'm not sure how well the business world has interpreted the ethical part of the book but it's certainly keen on the competitive part.

Then I see this in the news today: "Sun Tzu Corp. Announces Plans to Sell "Sun Tzu Energy Drink" in New 16 Oz. Can"

Sun Tzu Energy Drink? 

Just wow. I keep waiting on the punchline.  Or the link to the business plan competition. 

I'm reading The Myth of Rational Markets by Justin Fox right now.  It's amazing to me to see a recount of the thinking that led to the financial systems we have today.  So many thinkers looked at the same dataset and arrived at vastly different conclusions.  I remember many of these theories and actors from my academic studies in finance.  The way I remember them, however, is dubious.  I never actually read Security Analysis.  Or The Theory of Interest.  Or The Wealth of Nations firsthand.  Yet every textbook mentioned them and retold their tales so exquisitely that I felt as though I did.

I read books on books.

It can be argued that books on books is largely responsible for our financial follies.  We assumed finance to be the equivalent in principle of mathematics.  We assumed our assumptions were true yet there were no verifiable theorems or proofs.

In the age of public micro-messaging and the ability to so easily scour for truths, how does the lack of raw data affect our productivity?  How many trips will we make back to square one as a result of starting upon a faulty path?  It's a truism the the greatest tools to spread information also are the greatest to spread misinformation.

As we look at these platforms as a source of cultural and business change, I think it's important that we look to underlying data.  The metrics we are beginning to see on public micro-messaging are functions of frequency and amplitude.  Maybe we should add precision to that.  It's possible, like our financial markets, that these information markets won't always operate efficiently.