Dive into the archives.
- On Culture: How E. Bowen Illuminates S. Beckett
Augie March was a Chicagoan, born and bred. But Saul Bellow was born in Canada. Looking at the world from a window on the Upper West Side, I think of my own little piece of globalization. Two generations through Brooklyn and then Manhattan, from the Russo-Polish Pale; and I was looking, last week, at real [...]
- Increasing Dominance of the Nonhuman Environment
The New York cooperative building was facing a city ordered renovation that would cost each shareholder an additional $5000 this year, in excess of their 6% maintenance increase. It was a heavy burden; but there was nothing else for the board of directors to do, except to approve it. The work was ordered. There was [...]
- Market Irrationality, Personal Insolvency, and Psychoanalytic Study
Keynes’ sage observation that “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” organizes my thoughts today, on the psychoanalytic study of organizations. The movements of financial markets increasingly shape our societal and individual choices, so present themselves as the environing conditions of our lives. While we seek to understand them through our [...]
- Aporia: On knowing. On not knowing.
It is 8:05 AM: my cup of coffee and Financial Times are before me as I prepare for US markets to open. Andrew Hill, writing the “On management” column today, presents a chilling precis on BP and the snail’s pace of corporate culture change with far wider implications for investors: “A safety survey of the [...]
- The Electronic Herd and the Market as Open System
The current sway, within market systems, of what journalist Thomas Friedman called “the electronic herd” has revolutionized the way in which retail investors must approach the market. No longer are the benchmarks of financial statement analysis and technical analysis sufficient to judge the attractiveness of equity offerings. Rather, because of sudden and turbulent shifts of [...]
- The Psychological Challenge of QE
Its good to be back: trekking in the Himalayas with my friends Steve and Kathleen ( en route from Hong Kong to Sofia to pursue IT asset development as well as their upcoming marriage….) clears the head. Rising and falling with the 1000 meter ups-and-downs of red clay trails, rock scrambles, and torrential mountain streams, [...]
- Valuing Selective Attention as We Risk
BP is our tragedian of moment. Our anxieties are priced in the cost of its shares, off 50% since April. As investors, we anticipate significant punitive and reputational damages, eyeballing the $30bn gap between worst-case scenarios and its $20bn escrow fund, puzzling on internal bets between our personal fantasies of corporate resurrection and bankruptcy. What [...]
- DayTrading & Managing Our Own Minds
Increasingly, clients have described their turn to trading in volatile and uncertain markets, as their corporate incomes have vanished and their assessments of possible return to their former workforce positions have darkened. Day trading. Paradoxically, they have embraced uncertainty as their former sense of loyalty to firm and task has been disappointed. Their “security”, they [...]
- Thinking Out Loud: Making Explicit Individual & Organizational Similarity
An ongoing interest of mine is in linking the similarities across different psychological systems. Individual, group, and organizational systems share a number of common attributes. These include: a recognizable systemic identity; distinct rituals and practices; differences between the subject and other entities; specific intra-system roles and specializations; a capability to change; the fact that change [...]
- Case Study: Uncertainty and the Questionable Productivity of Certainty
Certainty is a momentary phenomenon of rootedness in the passing of time. The certain is the unchangeable, the fact of the present as it recedes into history. Beyond the unchangeable, looking forward, is the highly probable. Given what we know in the present, what do we see coming next? With slightly more uncertainty, we enter [...]
