The (first) one about experimentation
Part I: eye-opening statistics
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.
Now accepting keynotes for 25Q3-25Q4
The 2025 lineup:
What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: How to create a sustainable competitive advantage through superior adaptability. (Based on the new book by the same name.)
Succeed Big, Fail Small. How to drive efficiency and effectiveness of innovation at scale.
Leadership in Times of Uncertainty: How to steer an organization through a sea of change.
Retail 3.0: How to build a profitable retail business in the modern marketplace. (Based on the 2025 follow-up to the 2022 smash hit white paper The Gravity of e-Commerce.)
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, please do so at your earliest convenience; my availability is limited and the schedule tends to fill up fast. More information may be found here.
The TL;DR
Empirical research shows that managers and employees rarely understand their environments and therefore do not know what to do; there is no correlation between what people think will work and what actually does. The vast majority of business decisions, whether strategic or operational, therefore fail to deliver the value that firms expect.
The way to manage the problem is by running more experiments. However, few firms have the requisite know-how.
Investment strategists are more likely to understand how to manage volatility than their business strategist counterparts.
Trump is proving there was an F missing in The Art of the Deal; his negotiating skills are so bad that they will be studied (and ridiculed) for years to come.
Personal updates before we go-go
On one hand, Child Two, i.e., my now eight-month old daughter, has started to dance and it is the cutest thing. On the other, she also has begun to wake up in the middle of the night and simply refuse to go back to sleep. Not the cutest thing. Particularly given that whole fell beast thing.
Thank Jebus our closest neighbor is an old woman with poor hearing. Not convinced the dogs three houses down are happy though.
Anyway.
I am currently getting a lot of inquiries into uncertainty management; it is clearly the talking point of the moment for many firms and institutions. Few, however, know the intricacies of the topic.
While I simply do not have the time to help everyone individually, I could probably set something up for larger groups. Thus, I would greatly appreciate if those interested might answer the following poll:
Obviously, the pre-recorded presentation would be available for consumption at any time, though I would have to figure out how to solve the payment issue.
Moving on to markets.