Preface

My favourite authors are those who are very smart, but not that type of smart that stays only in the head and books. They practice what they preach. They have a skin in the game. While being very practical, they tend to see things that most people don't. It's as if they have a different lens that separates them from the crowd. Also, they tend to be avid readers and learners since their young age. They have been accumulating knowledge throughout their lives and, most importantly, they connect things, disciplines, epochs, and people's ideas to create their own. They relentlessly pursue them and prove to their skeptics (and there are numerous, especially in the beginning) that they have a point. They are the mavericks, and they are very few. My list is actually very short, and I will let the reader figure it out.

I am missing many of these attributes. Actually, the odds of being part of this very exclusive group is infinitesimal. I started seriously reading books very late, in my mid-twenties. I remember trying to read books when I was very young, but just the feeling was not there. In many books, authors often talk about how they stumbled upon one book or another in their parents' library or at school and how that sowed the seed of their curiosity, or maybe it's just part of their own narrative. No, that wasn't me at all. One day, in my early teens, during the summer holidays, I took a trip to a library with a rule to summarize the borrowed book. I don't really remember reading it, but what I do remember very well is that when I brought it back, I placed it on the librarian's desk quickly and ran away. At the same time, I can't say that we had many books at home nor did I come from a family of great readers.. Potential time to read was heavily spent on playing football and basketball. But things change.

Moreover, I learned English, as my third language, even later, in my thirties. And I did that for a specific purpose: to enroll in an MBA program, which had a huge effect on the way I see things unfold in the world of business. However, the effect was not the one expected. More later.

Despite these initial disadvantages, here I am writing a book about business and life, and in English. It's a sort of me rebelling against my own path. It's also a f*you book to the box that ourselves and others put us into. More positively, it’s a hope to take whatever you got from life and turn it into endless possibilities, provided one really wants it, and I wanted it very badly. This world of possibilities is the outcome of something, I dare to say, getting me slightly closer to the authors I look up to. It's my relentless intellectual curiosity. I don't know exactly how it started, but I know it represent a lot in my life. One idea leads to another, one book generates a wish list of others in search of something very deep that I don't really understand. Maybe it's a search for meaning. A psychoanalyst would hypothesize that it's because I was deprived of it when I was little or to make a point to my parents. But who cares? It's interesting to see that one ingredient pushed to the extreme can make up for missing others, regardless of one's own nature AND nurture, for the whole recipe to work. This nonlinearity is essential in this book and it's almost everywhere.

The idea behind this book started a long time ago. How come management models and tools taught in business schools, and which are widely used in companies don't work the way we want them to? How come, when implemented, the outcomes are not systematic? Some people may argue that these models sometimes work, and sometimes they don't. Others would say that the tools are good, but managers don't know how to use them. This reminds me of the old saying that in academia, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in the real world, there is. I also remember an executive who used to say that he had the best strategy, but he just needed others to implement it. He didn’t understand that strategy, or for that matter any idea, is almost nothing without implementation. So, all these people are confirming my point. A model that does not replicate with some confidence and does not consider the change factor is a model that does not work, period.

To borrow Nassim Taleb's example, when boarding a plane, one should be almost certain about the outcome of the flight. No one would say planes sometimes work and sometimes they don't. So, why for example embark on a strategy by design initiative with its standard processes, engaged resources, using linear thinking when the outcome certainty is very doubtful especially in a rapidly changing world? You would hear executive asking their team to take separate flights to manage the risk of losing everyone at once and at the same time taking significant risk in a strategy exercise. This is something that truly baffles me. It's no wonder that many so-called strategies end up failing.

This plane example, taken from the world of physics and engineering as opposed to matters related to socio-economics , is central in this book. The main issue in relation to these models and tools is that they have morphed into a management orthodoxy, a sort of doctrine, what I call "managerialism". It's the standard way to do business.I have seen many people applying things blindly without a shred of critical thinking as if it was a universal law.  Depart from it at your own peril.

I attended a conference on healthcare some time ago, where one of the keynote speakers presented how she implemented a management program. She emphasized the importance of having a company vision and stated that the company didn't even have one before, as if having a vision is a requirement for every company. It is this sort of dogma that I am fighting. Deviate from the mainstream thinking and questioning established ideas can make you seem like an outsider or "weirdo." Throughout my almost 20 years in the corporate world, I observed, strategized, and experimented, which led me to question all established ideas. One of the areas I questioned was how budgets were developed and their effect on changing people's behavior. Unfortunately, when I raised these concerns, people looked at me as if I was talking gibberish.

At one point, I was part of a restructuring team where operational managers proposed cost-cutting initiatives. I immediately voiced my concerns, stating that these measures would rather increase costs twofold in the future, and I explained why. The response I received from a decision-maker was unforgettable. They dismissed my concerns by saying, "Yes, but this is a finance thing." Despite my warnings, they went ahead with the initiative, only to realize later that what I had predicted came true. However, since the people making the decisions were not the ones left to manage the consequences, they didn't seem to care. Interestingly, the person I was primarily communicating with at that time ended up leaving the company.

Considering the restructuring costs were put "below the line," the individuals responsible for the change left the company, and operating costs increased twofold for others. I wonder what kind of model can capture this dynamic situation. I'm certain that the restructuring team followed proper change management steps, possibly using John Kotter's framework, and even sought external help. However, despite their efforts, the outcome was disastrous, and very few people even noticed because new teams had joined. So, an alien yes I was.

The questions related to the way management is practiced led me to embark on a long, tortuous but very fulfilling journey. After completing my MBA, I was eager to put into practice what I had learned, from strategy to finance and marketing. I felt equipped with all the necessary knowledge to understand and act within an organization. However, things were not right; something was missing, something was wrong, as if the whole environment did not actually align with the theory. Later, I came to understand that it was the other way around.

The journey of questioning began with one book that had a profound effect on how I saw the world. It was my red pill. It happened on one of those rainy days in wintery Brussels when I Talked into a bookstore that primarily sold books in French. However, there was a small and dark downstairs section dedicated to books in English. Why choose easy things Despite having just finished my MBA, my thirst for knowledge and curiosity persisted. I am not exactly sure how I found that book, but I remember having heard about the author and his famous other book before, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. Yet, I had never actually read it. One word in the title caught my attention: Randomness.

The book, 'Fooled by Randomness' (FBR), written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is part of his “oeuvre called 'Incerto', which means uncertainty in Latin. It’s a collection of five books among which the high profile “Black Swan” which was widely read in the aftermath of the crisis. FBR is not only a masterpiece on its own but was for me a gateway to the thriving world of complexity and complex systems. It led me to explore various subjects such as physics, anthropology, evolutionary biology, information theory, complexity economics, and the multidisciplinary field of complexity science that studies the behavior of a collection of agents interacting with each other, resulting in macro behaviors.

I also discovered the fascinating world of computation through the work of another genius, Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram possesses a unique combination of skills and expertise in science, particularly physics, business, and computation. In this new world of knowledge, I found myself delving into a world full of new concepts that embrace the change, the only thing constant. A world that is very difficult to predict but a world full of excitement and with endless possibilities. However, amidst the absorption of all this knowledge, I realized that the business world operates in a very strange way. A way that ignores dynamics and change despite their omnipresence.  

So, I developed my own theory to understand why things are the way they are, and I will delve further into this idea later. We live in a world of increasing complexity, driven by high connectivity, both physical and virtual. As a human species, we have become overwhelmed by this complexity, causing us to revert to familiar ways of seeing and doing things. These ways have become our guiding beacons. In the past, doctrines and religions served as beacons, guiding people through survival heuristics for centuries. Now, in the world where sacred matters were transferred to the profane, different forms of doctrines have taken over, “managerialism” being one of them. Instead of taking the time to deeply reflect and think things through, we rely on pre-packaged concepts and repeat them over and over until they become institutionalized. It is this institutionalization that I am fighting against, using science, history, and real-world practice.

I can't even imagine the impact of technologies such as ChatGPT on this whole thing. Sometimes, I find myself resisting the use of it because I don't want my ideas to be influenced by other 'statistically coherent ideas'. Therefore, I spend a lot of time thinking and thinking things through. While I believe that many will benefit from the technology, I am certain that it will make people intellectually even lazier. Thinking is a muscle that needs to be trained repeatedly and outsourcing it to a machine will profoundly affect how we approach real-world problems. The consequences will be monumental.