Career advice from Dilbert’s Scott Adams:

But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility.

Business advice from Chase Jarvis:

[shoot] what’s not out there.

- from this interview (about 41 minutes in)

Chase studies the photography landscape hunting for photos, not with the pack, but where the pack isn’t. It is this approach that led to his innovative portfolio and his continued success.

Bonus: Chase Jarvis videos on Strobist.

An interesting article in the NYTimes on reading habits of CEOs:

Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete.

Perhaps that is why — more than their sex lives or bank accounts — chief executives keep their libraries private.

I’m in the midst of choosing some new bookcases. My book collection is starting to get out of hand. A good problem to have methinks.

Thanks to Brad for the link, and for a number of great book recommendations from his blog.

If the tone of this book seems steeped in the culture of Darwinism and evolutionary thinking, it does not come from any remotely formal training in the natural sciences, but from the evolutionary way of thinking taught by my Monte Carlo simulators.

Nassim Taleb revised his book on the way humans deal with randomness; how we rationalize luck. It is worth a read. (Recommended by the likes of Tom Peters, and Peter Bernstein).

The part that grabbed my attention was Nassim’s use of Monte Carlo simulations, to test out scenarios. The simulator allows exploration of alternate paths, both past and future. Evolution is a search technique to find successful survival strategies for a particular scenario. In biology, we have only one scenario to investigate: ours. The Monte Carlo simulator allows testing strategies under different scenarios.

This is very similar to the work on complexity theory being done at the Santa Fe institute (as told in the Origin of Wealth). Nassim refers to their work later in the book:

The so-called complexity theorists came to the rescue. … Clearly these scientists are trying hard, and providing us with wonderful solutions in the physical sciences and better models in the social siblings (though nothing satisfactory there yet).

The key is the yet.

I’m holding out hope for complexity theory as applied to economics and finance. The classical equilibrium models don’t resonate strongly with my understanding of this world. Early research into the application of complexity theory rings very true.

Even if the numbers don’t hold out exactly, the model provided matches my understanding of people and markets much better. Nassim himself says it best:

Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than compute.

Lets hope it can deliver both.

From The Origin of Wealth:

Markets win over command and control, not because of their efficiency at resource allocation in equilibrium, but because of their effectiveness at innovation in disequilibrium.

Evolution, genetic algorithms and complexity theory, as applied to economics: It is a search problem.

This book foretells the demise of economic theories based on equilibrium. To tell the story, a wide path is walked through the history of economics, advanced computer science, physics and some chaos theory. Very interesting reading, if you are interested in economics, or why economics works or doesn’t (quite) work.

For a review, see John Hagel’s article.

This week’s Economist has a special report on international banking. With the rise in new types of financial instruments, and private equity firms, this is a very timely discussion.

With increased competition, the banks are scouring the globe for new markets to shore up their business.

Currently, the expansions have been into so-called BRIC markets (Brazil, Russia, India, China). The next horizon for expansion has been dubbed by Goldman as N11 and includes the following:

• Bangladesh
• Egypt
• Indonesia
• Iran
• South Korea
• Mexico
• Nigeria
• Pakistan
• the Philippines
• Turkey
• Vietnam

This is not a set of economies without risk. However, as the global investment banks set up shop, easier access to western style financial controls should improve matters.