Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong

This is the second article I've read recently about Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis. The implications are staggering.

The Atlantic published an earlier article about Ioannidis: "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science".

Now, if medical research can go so wrong, how likely is it that business research suffers from many of the same failures?

"The Heroes of Freedom" by Lawrence Reed

The Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEE) has been linked on this blog for several years now. It provides a great set of resources for students of economic thought and liberty.

I just found out today that FEE has opened an office in Atlanta, GA, and that President Lawrence Reed will be hosting a talk in my hometown of Newnan, GA on February 15. You can obtain more details here.

I am really looking forward to this.

The Tau Manifesto

Or Tauism - seeking the way of tau
by Michael Hart

Just for fun on a cold winter's afternoon.

Have you tested your strategy lately?

McKinsey offers some useful tests to determine the quality of a corporate strategy. But do you know HOW to create a strategy that passes the tests?

Here are four of the ten tests. They aren't necessarily the most important, but the issues they address crop up in EVERY client I serve. My suspicion, then, is that those same issues crop up in every organization.

Test 5: Does your strategy rest on privileged insights?
Test 6: Does your strategy embrace uncertainty?
Test 7: Does your strategy balance commitment and flexibility?
Test 8: Is your strategy contaminated by bias?

So, I ask...

• How do you gain insights where others don't?
• How do you handle uncertainty in the decision making process of strategic planning?
• Do you quantify the effects of uncertainty? Do you know how to?
• Do you know how much uncertainty leads to potential risk?
• How do you make tradeoffs in the decision to gather better information and the cost to do so?
• How do you make tradeoffs in the decision to gain more control over uncertain events and the cost to do so?
• Do you attempt to optimize strategies (exposing them to fragility) or make them robust to a wide range of events?
• How do you control for the effects of bias and avoid committing to favorite strategies versus better ones?