Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
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Now accepting keynotes for 24Q2-24Q3
Every year, I create three main presentation decks. For 2024, they are:
What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: How to turn uncertainty into a competitive advantage. (Based on my new book by the same name.)
Regression Toward the Meme: Why modern leadership falls into old traps - and how to avoid them.
The Efficiency Illusion: How to uncover the hidden costs of digital commerce and create profitable growth.
If you want to book me for your event, corporate speaking slot, or workshop, merely send me an email. To make sure I am available, however, please do so at your earliest convenience; my availability is limited and the schedule is filling up fast. More information may be found here.
A couple of updates points before we go-go
If there is one thing that I wish was more common, it would be for people to challenge (or at the very least acknowledge) their assumptions. Partly because it is rather quite important in itself, but also because a lot of organizational schisms emerge out of thereto unchallenged personal truths.
To illustrate, this morning I saw someone once again share a claim that marketers need to embrace the risk vs reward approach central to modern portfolio theory (MPT). As I have both a background in corporate finance and have had to study risk management extensively for the book (my co-author, Steve, is a renowned expert in the field), it was easy to spot the weaknesses in the argument. A few of the assumptions:
First, that the author understood the concepts of risk and reward. Given that they were a marketer and not a risk manager, that is hardly certain. The post did not reveal that they did. Do you know what risk is?
Second, that the author understood MPT. Given that they were a marketer and not a financial analysts, that is hardly certain. The post did not reveal that they did. Do you know what MPT is?
Third, that MPT is a good tool with which to analyze market patterns in the first place. Given that it has been disproven in theory by people such as Benoit Mandelbrot and in practice by people such as Mark Spitznagel, that is hardly certain. The post did not reveal any groundbreaking new additions to the model. Do you know the limitations of MPT?
Fourth, that the assumptions that MPT in turn makes are fundamentally sound. Given that it relies on market events adhering to Gaussian distributions, and that markets are complex and therefore Paretian in nature, that is hardly certain. The post did not reveal that market patterns suddenly had changed. Do you know how markets behave?
I could go on, but I suspect that the point is made.
We make similar assumptions all the time, but most are oblivious to it because the claims (or their interpretations of the claims) lower their cognitive dissonance.
Not only is this dangerous, but it leads to a modus operandi whereby assumptions soon are laundered into facts. When it is revealed that other opinions are available, frustration sets in as the person who made the assumption falsely believes that the other party is ignoring facts - when they are merely questioning the line of reasoning.
Which, to my original point, they absolutely should.
Certainly, one could make the counterpoint that this is all being a bit too picky; the post merely illustrates the need for marketers to also consider the potential cost of error (which I have long argued for publicly). But if marketers want to speak the language of finance (which I, again, have long argued for publicly), then they might want to first ensure that they get the words right.
Moving on.