Tag Archives: prediction

Gresham’s Law of Strategy: Why Bad Advice Drives out Good Advice

Posted on October 10, 2011 by | 20 comments

Near the end of a seminal essay on strategic surprise, Richard Betts writes, “The intelligence officer may perform most usefully by not offering the answers sought by authorities, but by offering questions, acting as a Socratic agnostic, nagging decision makers into awareness of the full range of uncertainty, and making authorities’ calculations harder rather than easier.”  I believe that the same should be true for corporate strategy consultants:  often their job is to make long-range calculations harder rather than easier.

Why then, is the opposite so often true?  In a world in which surprise, disruption and the unanticipated are rife, why do strategists who promise to make calculations easier rather than harder often succeed?  I think a phenomenon that I call of “Gresham’s Law of Strategic Advice” is at work.

E pluribus unum

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We have met the enemy and he is, er, forecasting

Posted on June 22, 2011 by | 7 comments

There is no doubt we are terribly bad at forecasting. Even the smartest among us are. Even the best and the brightest, whom we have tasked to save the world from financial annihilation, are.  Take Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve. In 2004, he declared, in a speech ominously titled “The Great Moderation”: “One of the most striking features of the economic landscape over the past twenty years or so has been a substantial decline in macroeconomic volatility. This […] makes me optimistic for the future.” You might want to read the full transcript of the “Great Moderation” talk here because it is for a fascinating reading on how wrong experts can be at forecasting. And it’s not just Ben. In fact, political, economic and business histories are littered by forecasts and predictions that turned out to be ridiculously wrong. From the commercial potential of the Xerox machine or of Nespresso, from the possibility of heavier than air flight to the market for mobile phones, from prosperity at the corner of the street to Japan as number One. Our hopelessness at forecasting is a confirmed fact.

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China’s Present, the World’s Future, and the Pretense of Knowledge

Posted on May 15, 2011 by | 7 comments

Last Tuesday I attended the Economist’s Bellwether Europe conference in London.  Several speakers raised ideas that made me want to follow up Philippe’s latest piece “Has China Peaked?”.

At the conference, many speakers and panelist (from regulators like the FSA’s Martin Wheatley, to economists like Roubini’s Arnab Das, to portfolio managers like Blackrock’s Richard Kushel) linked the future stability of the Eurozone and the prosperity of America to the continued growth of China.  Niall Ferguson was even more explicit, saying at one point that “The governor of the PBOC has far more control over the future of the US and European economies than either Ben Bernanke or Jean-Claude Trichet”.  I tend to agree that US and EU economic stability is tied to Chinese growth, but am worried by that fact,  and skeptical about Chinese “control” of their economy either through their Central Bank or through “administrative measures”.

The People's Bank

The image evoked by statements such as Ferguson’s (even though I am sure he is too smart to have intended it) is of a carefully calculating Zhou Xiachuan sitting behind a desk in Beijing pressing buttons and pulling levers – a man in commanding a linear, essentially Newtonian system.  The same tends to happen when people talk about the powers and actions of the Fed and the ECB.  Even so-called “centrally planned” economies don’t work like that.  Economies are not not machines, and they are not linear in the sense that once the behavior of its component pieces are understood individually, one simply needs to add them up to predict – and control via a Central Bank or other bureaucracy – the behavior of the whole.

A point which is not original but which bears repeating because it is so often forgotten is that Economics is not Physics, it’s a “Social Science” (a false metaphor if there ever was one).  As one scholar says “God gave Physics the easy problems” and the behavior of economies is non-linear rather than additive.

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Has China peaked? An exercise in forecasting using Neustadt and May’s History framework

Posted on May 4, 2011 by | 5 comments

China has long been touted as the next leading power, and for many it seems that the question is no longer if China will overtake the US but when. Recently, however, a number of dissenting opinions have started to be heard. Economists point to the strong imbalances in China’s economy; political analysts observe that the political and social structure is unstable; human right activists warn of increasing censorship and repression, while historians suggest that, like the USSR in the late 80s, China’s communist regime has run its course and is on an unsustainable path. Indeed, “hard landing” stories about China have started to appear, by Roubini or by Gordon Chang.

Like any such debate, or lack of debate (instead, it is a series of proclamations), positions are often taken being selective about facts, based on false analogies, shallow extrapolations, ideology, or just plain ignorance. This is problematic because regardless of what we think about China, the country does matter to us in many ways. What can we do about this, then?

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How firms fail to act on a disruption and fall as a result: the case of AT&T in 2005

Posted on April 20, 2011 by | Leave a comment

A central tenet of innovation research is that firms often fail to act on a disruption that threatens their business, and falter as a result. A case in point is AT&T, the 120 year-old subsidiary of Bell Telephone Company, child of Alexander Graham Bell, an American icon.

In 2005, AT&T was sold to SBC Communications. It was in a way a family story, as SBC Communications started in the mid-eighties as the smallest of the seven “baby bells”, the companies created after the regulator ordered the AT&T break-up.  But what a story !

AT&T introduced many innovations, and not small ones:  first commercial radio (1922), first television transmission (1927), first mobile phone (1946 !), first transistor (1947), first telecom satellite (1962).  AT&T has long been a giant of the economic landscape:  one million employees at the beginning of the 80s, and not so long ago a market value of $180 billion (1999).

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