Interesting to note that once you claim to be holding an ‘election’, or that your country is a ‘democracy’, it makes it possible to put you on the hook for things you wouldn’t normally want to be on the hook for. So, Iran is now making ‘reluctant concessions’ with regard to the farce of election …
As an experiment in sociology and blogging, Jenn (from whatisthewhat.wordpress.com) and I have put together a brief video on culture and markets, the beginning of what we hope will be a conversation at the intersection of culture, sociology, and economics. We’ll work on the lighting and switch off the big-head/small-head, but we hope you like …
Let’s say that the CEO of an organization publicly announces during a board meeting that if the org misses its (ambitious) numbers over the coming year, she will eliminate X employees. We know that often, public announcements of impossible goals get met not by actually meeting those goals, but by shifting the goalposts down the …
Having trouble finding a common time to set a meeting? Problem solved! Pass this handy-dandy sheet along to all the member of the committee, and let the matchy-matchy begin! I guarantee that, unless someone is out of town, you will be able to nail down a time within an absolute maximum two-week window. Make-a-meeting
Put it on your radar screens, the next big thing is going to be XBRL. It stands for extensible business reporting language, and it is meant to commensurate business reporting via standardization. So instead of entering text into an annual report, companies, governments, NGOs, anyone who would like to comply with governmental mandate will be …
I’ve taken issue before with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s black swan thesis, that high-impact, low-probability events are responsible for market crises and accidents. The more general implication is, as Taleb and Pilpel note: What matters in life is the equation probability × consequence. This point might appear to be simple, but its consequences are not. Suppose …
Jeremy Grantham, principal of GMO, makes an interesting point about quants in his 4th quarter letter to investors (free registration required): The good old days of the domination of the first generation quant models, where you simply show up with three concepts – value, momentum, and discipline – are over. But, even more critically and, …
An anthropologist attempts to explain variation in how investment banks fared in the current credit crisis. Gilian Tett argues that three elements account for it: 1) successful firms have hands-on management (meddlers); 2) successful firms have management who rose through the ranks via trading desks rather than sales or legal; 3) successful firms have a …
I’ve been thinking a lot about institutions lately, in light of my earlier post on check-lists and medical practices. I originally had in mind a post about how the Berger and Luckmann version of institutionalization at the more marco-level is about the crystallization of practices. So what check-lists are theoretically are the same as other …