Category: Business, Organization, and Management

OUT THERE ON THE HORIZON WITH WHATEVER CAPITAL YOU HAVE.

I used to be so patient with business partners, customers, employees, and to really work with them to try to help them to understand whatever broader point I was trying to get across. And I worked constantly on my business partners and board members in particular, to help them ‘see’ what I always took to be relatively obvious, or to get them to test what I saw what but was unsure of.

As a CEO I assume I am wrong, and use my management team to test my theories. If I cannot get them on board, then I assume my theory is either wrong or insufficiently thought out. For this reason we did and I always did, try to get unanimous consent. (This turns out to be a deterministic behavior resulting from INTP personalities, but I didn’t know that at the time.)

Of course, back then, while I understood the scientific method, Popperian skepticism, the theory of incentives and Austrian economics, the problem of ‘calculation’, and of course, market competition, I did not have Propertarianism figured out, or the relationship between Operationalism and Intuitionism and performative truth, even though I had intuited some aspects of it much earlier.

So what I saw as open to intuition if I just pressed on with people, and kept trying to ‘help them see’, was really not available to them at all. I think like most people they saw pedagogy, fragments of reason, end results of my efforts, but they never really understood much at all. And that’s because it was so vast a leap, that it was impossible.

So in retrospect, while I am still angry that I could not get them to help me avoid the recession-depression, nor recover from it, they paid in their wealth for not helping me.

But it was far too much to expect from even well read, well educated, scientifically knowledgeable, technology savvy, financially sophisticated, business savvy people. I might as well have been talking to high school kids.

And I sort of feel sorry for them instead. An myself. For my naivety. Lacking sufficient empathy, I was unable to intuit what ordinary people do, or what ordinary professors usually do.

This is the first time I have felt this kind of revelation. Which is again, a problem of autistic incompetence. Incompetence only solved through the kind of neurogenesis we get from time and mental exercise. Just as we repair our ability to walk or think after an accident. Food, water, sleep and mental exercise.

Businesses are run by above average people, employ average people, and by and large serve average and below average people. Very smart people rarely accumulate great wealth, because nothing in that process is all that interesting really. Until the rise of technology, which all but eliminated the capital requirements for the creation of disruptive business value. (although, I suspect, like the competitive value of electricity, the competitive value of this era of ‘calculating’ software has nearly reached its zenith. And it will require ‘thinking’ software to create another such leap. And as such the world returns to normal: above average people run everything of consequence, in the service of average and below average people. And exceptional people make-do with the playthings and problems available to them.

The only place for people like me (and some of you) is in entrepreneurial positions where we do not require a great deal of external consent in order to compete and innovate. Because it is impossible to equip external parties with the knowledge and understanding to make rational choices. They can only gamble on what they cannot understand using fragments of what they do understand. And for us, that means largely self funding one’s efforts.

If you are sufficiently out there on the horizon then you are standing there, alone, with whatever capital you have.

Same goes for philosophy.