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0 pointscoldtea8y ago0 comments

>Can you manage a tech company without understanding technology?

Yes. You just need to understand people, markets, and processes.

Any deep technology insight will be irrelevant -- the right advisors from your stuff (which you'll know who they are, since, as we said above, you can understand people -- including when they are full of shit or not), can explain it to you "like you are five".

Taleb makes a similar point described here that extends beyond the domains in the story:

One of the most successful traders to ever buy and sell green lumber – which is freshly cut wood – actually had no idea what he was trading. He spent his entire career trading green lumber career believing the product was just wood painted green, and not newly cut trees. His ignorance of the product had no impact on his ability to make money trading it. The term “Green Lumber Fallacy” was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his excellent book ‘Antifragile’, where he outlined a second similar situation: a star Swiss Franc trader who’s inability to locate Switzerland on the map didn’t hinder his ability to make money trading its currency.

https://www.pinnacle.com/en/betting-articles/betting-psychol...

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TeMPOraL8y ago

There's a flipside to this though - this is how you get shit and useless products. What you (or Taleb) are describing here is a money-making specialist. A person who can play the market and management game well. That's almost entirely orthogonal to creating the best product, or doing something valuable for society.

The argument I'm trying to make here is very similar to the one about MBAs ruining companies. You get people who can play the market game so well their incentives get completely misaligned with what the rest of the company would like (and what the customers would like).

And in general - as a society we like free markets and competitions because they're supposed to give us a spectrum of products, from cheap but good enough to expensive and high quality, in an efficient way. But people who are too good at optimizing for the way markets work can make money without giving us the result we expect, thus ruining the very reason we want capitalist economy.

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TeMPOraL8y ago

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