Category: Strategy

Black Operation

A “Black Operation” or “Black Op” is a covert operation typically involving activities that are highly secret due to questionable ethics and legality. The term itself is often used in political, military, intelligence and business circles. Agents or persons who specialise or are involved in a black operation are typically referred to as a “Black Operator” or “Black Operative.”

Black Ops missions often fall into the deniability category, where no government will claim responsibility for the action, or where responsibility is shifted to another actor in the case of a “false flag” operation.

False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to appear as though they are being carried out by other entities. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own.

Randy Pausch

Randolph Frederick Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was an American professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a best-selling author who achieved worldwide fame for his “The Last Lecture” speech on September 18, 2007 at Carnegie Mellon. The lecture was conceived after, in summer 2007, Pausch had learned that his previously known pancreatic cancer was terminal.

Pausch delivered his “Last Lecture,” titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” at CMU on September 18, 2007. This talk was modeled after an ongoing series of lectures where top academics are asked to think deeply about what matters to them, and then give a hypothetical “final talk,” i.e., “what wisdom would you try to impart to the world if you knew it was your last chance?”

The experience of a lifetime

Hedonism is the philosophy that pleasure is of ultimate importance, the most important pursuit. The name derives from the Greek word for “delight”

The basic idea behind hedonistic thought is that pleasure is the only thing that is good for a person. This is often used as a justification for evaluating actions in terms of how much pleasure and how little pain (i.e. suffering) they produce. In very simple terms, a hedonist strives to maximise this total pleasure (pleasure minus pain).

John Stuart Mill believed that there can be different levels of pleasure – higher quality pleasure is better than lower quality pleasure. Mill also argues that simpler beings (he often references pigs) have an easier access to the simpler pleasures; since they do not see other aspects of life, they can simply indulge in their pleasures. The more elaborate beings tend to spend more thought on other matters and hence lessen the time for simple pleasure. It is therefore more difficult for them to indulge in such “simple pleasures” in the same manner.

Ayn Rand, one of the biggest modern proponents of Egoism, rejected hedonism in a literal sense as a comprehensive ethical system:

To take “whatever makes one happy” as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one’s emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition. . . . This is the fallacy inherent in hedonism–in any variant of ethical hedonism, personal or social, individual or collective. “Happiness” can properly be the purpose of ethics, but not the standard. The task of ethics is to define man’s proper code of values and thus to give him the means of achieving happiness. To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that “the proper value is whatever gives you pleasure” is to declare that “the proper value is whatever you happen to value”–which is an act of intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics and invites all men to play it deuces wild.

Liebig's Law of the Minimum

Liebig’s Law of the Minimum, often simply called Liebig’s Law or the Law of the Minimum, is a principle developed in agricultural science by Carl Sprengel (1828) and later popularized by Justus von Liebig. It states that growth is controlled not by the total of resources available, but by the scarcest resource. This concept was originally applied to plant or crop growth, where it was found that increasing the amount of plentiful nutrients did not increase plant growth. Only by increasing the amount of the limiting nutrient (the one most scarce in relation to “need”) was the growth of a plant or crop improved.

Liebig used the image of a barrel—now called Liebig’s barrel—to explain his law. Just as the capacity of a barrel with staves of unequal length is limited by the shortest stave, so a plant’s growth is limited by the nutrient in shortest supply.

Cognitive restructuring

Cognitive restructuring in cognitive therapy is the process of learning to refute cognitive distortions, or fundamental “faulty thinking,” with the goal of replacing one’s irrational, counter-factual beliefs with more accurate and beneficial ones.

The cognitive restructuring theory holds that your own unrealistic beliefs are directly responsible for generating dysfunctional emotions and their resultant behaviors, like stress, depression, anxiety, and social withdrawal, and that we humans can be rid of such emotions and their effects by dismantling the beliefs that give them life. Because one sets unachievable goals — “Everyone must love me; I have to be thoroughly competent; I have to be the best in everything” — a fear of failure results.

Cognitive restructuring then advises to change such irrational beliefs and substitute more rational ones: “I can fail. Although it would be nice, I didn’t have to be the best in everything.” [Ellis and Harper, 1975; Ellis 1998]

This is accomplished by leading the subject to:

* Gain awareness of detrimental thought habits
* Learn to challenge them
* Substitute life-enhancing thoughts and beliefs

The rationale used in cognitive restructuring attempts to strengthen the client’s belief that 1) ‘self-talk’ can influence performance, and 2) in particular self-defeating thoughts or negative self-statements can cause emotional distress and interfere with performance, a process that then repeats again in a cycle.

What will destroy us?

The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.”

~ Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi ~

Black swan theory

“So far, the losses reported on Wall Street are staggering. But rumors of much larger losses are being whispered…and at least one source has suggested that the firms may be bankrupt…crushed by total system-wide losses of more than $3 trillion.”

In Nassim Taleb’s definition, a “black swan” is a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. Taleb regards many scientific discoveries as black swans—”undirected” and unpredicted. He gives the September 11, 2001 attacks as an example of a Black Swan event.

The term black swan comes from the ancient Western conception that all swans were white. In that context, a black swan was a metaphor for something that could not exist. The 17th Century discovery of black swans in Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass.

Taleb’s Black Swan has a central and unique attribute: the high impact. His claim is that almost all consequential events in history come from the unexpected—while humans convince themselves that these events are explainable in hindsight.

Taleb believes that most people ignore “black swans” because we are more comfortable seeing the world as something structured, ordinary, and comprehensible. Taleb calls this blindness the Platonic fallacy, and argues that it leads to three distortions:

1. Narrative fallacy: creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have a cause.

2. Ludic fallacy: believing that the structured randomness found in games resembles the unstructured randomness found in life. Taleb faults random walk models and other inspirations of modern probability theory for this inadequacy.

3. Statistical regress fallacy: believing that the probability of future events is predictable by examining occurrences of past events.

He also believes that people are subject to the triplet of opacity, through which history is distilled even as current events are incomprehensible. The triplet of opacity consists of

1. an illusion of understanding of current events

2. a retrospective distortion of historical events

3. an overvalue of facts, combined with an overvalue of the intellectual elite

Maktub (it is written)

“You have told me about your dreams… And I am a part of your dream, a part of your destiny, as you call it.

That’s why I want you to continue toward your goal. If you have to wait until the war is over, then wait. But if you have to go before then, go on in pursuit of your dream. The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes. That’s the way it will be with our love for each other.

“Maktub,” she said. “If I am really a part of your dream, you’ll come back one day.”

Steve Friedman

If you are not constantly working for constructive strategic change, then you are the steward of something which must erode. Competitors will leapfrog over you, and clients will find you less relevant. If that was your approach, why would you even want the job?

– Steve Friedman, Former CEO of Goldman Sachs