Obliquity— John Kay

Preface

But it isn’t just economists who make that mistake. Politicians, investors, bankers and business people believe that although they don’t solve problems according to a standard model of rational decision making, they ought to. So they pretend that they do— to others, and perhaps to themselves.

A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

At the end of her life, in the 1860s, when she had become the Grande Dame of Champagne, Barbe-Nicole wrote to a great-grandchild, “The world is in perpetual motion, and we must invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence direct your life. Act with audacity.” Act with audacity! In other words, play to win.

Economists end up solving this problem by denying it (a mechanism that Stafford Beer looked at in detail, concluding that ignorance is a kind of information processing system of last resort). Where analysis fails, ideology steps in, and the solution the economists decided on was to fantasise an equivalent system for producers — a profit-maximising firm with an understanding of its market, a style production process and a manageable set of decisions. It ended up going disastrously wrong, but the original intellectual sin may have been the failure to respect the integrity of the black box.

Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be.

—Jeff Bezos