This Intelligence Briefing is our twice monthly publication in which Rodenberg Tillman & Associates identifies and discusses worldly events triggered by possible Gray & Black Swans and/or Gray Rhinos.

Highlights from “It Can’t Be True”

September 15, 2015
Joseph Rodenberg
A World View, Intelligence Briefings

The book “It Can’t Be True”, published in February 2015, was based on 2 years of research from over 200 in-depth interviews in the City of London. In his book. Luyendijk makes comparisons with the world of animals: traders are baboons, investment bankers are tigers, back-office employees are hard-working beavers and the departments of compliance and risk management are ants. The majority of the employees in the sector are therefore beavers and ants whose task is to control the tigers and baboons. Mission impossible!

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Top management and change

August 15, 2015
Joseph Rodenberg
A World View, Intelligence Briefings

We frequently ask ourselves “Why doesn’t top management see change?” In 2014, the Dutch financial newspaper, Het Financieele Dagblad, published an astonishing article about another international Dutch company taken by surprise: SBM Offshore. This company is active in the global offshore oil & gas exploration business. The newspaper heading was “Market forces us to lay off jobs”.

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Contextual intelligence

August 1, 2015
Joseph Rodenberg
A World View, Intelligence Briefings

The statement above was made by Tarun Khanna in Harvard Business Review in both September and November 2014. Context is the background in which a future event takes place, it is often real or perceived and includes factors such as geography, genders, industries, job roles, attitudes, beliefs, values, politics, cultures, symbols, organizational climate, the past, personal ethics and the preferred future.

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We didn’t see it

July 15, 2015
Joseph Rodenberg
A World View, Intelligence Briefings

This statement by Paul van Riel, CEO of Fugro, in the Dutch financial newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad on 30th October, 2014. Fugro is the world’s largest integrator of geotechnical survey, subsea and geosciences services. The company is 70-80 percent dependent on what is going on in the oil and gas sector. In September 2013, Fugro launched its new “Growth through Leadership” strategy aimed at an annual growth of 10 percent in the next couple of years. In the spring of 2014, the first warnings were issued regarding under-performance and pressure on profitability.

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Management suffers from three crucial biases

July 1, 2015
Joseph Rodenberg
A World View, Intelligence Briefings

We are forced to establish beliefs about the world, our lives, the economy, investments, and our careers among others. We deal mostly in assumptions, and the more indistinct these are, the stronger the confirmation bias. The ‘confirmation bias’ is the mother of all misconceptions: It reflects our tendency to interpret new information so that it becomes compatible with our existing theories, beliefs and convictions.

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The drama of MH17

June 15, 2015
Joseph Rodenberg
A World View, Intelligence Briefings

These are merely two among many other comments relating to the dramatic flight of MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. We can’t blame them, we can’t blame anyone, except those persons actually responsible for launching the missile on 17th July, 2014. But we can learn from this to overcome such dramatic events in the future!

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Antifragility

June 1, 2015
Joseph Rodenberg
A World View, Intelligence Briefings

Black swans are large-scale unpredictable and irregular events that have a massive consequence. Examples are a tsunami, huge storms like Sandy in 2012, 9/11, Madrid 2004, and the loss of MH17. Antifragility means randomness, uncertainty, dealing with the unknown, doing things without understanding them and doing them well. However, it is easier to find out if something is fragile.

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