Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence against it. A management scholar, William Starbuck, has published a few papers debunking the effectiveness of planning—it makes the corporation option-blind, as it gets locked into a non-opportunistic course of action. Almost everything theoretical in management, from Taylorism to all productivity stories, upon empirical testing, has been exposed as pseudoscience—and like most economic theories, lives in a world parallel to the evidence. Matthew Stewart, who, trained as a philosopher, found himself in a management consultant job, gives a pretty revolting, if funny, inside story in The Management Myth. It is similar to the self-serving approach of bankers. Abrahamson and Friedman, in their beautiful book A Perfect Mess, also debunk many of these neat, crisp, teleological approaches. It turns out, strategic planning is just superstitious babble.