Friday, December 02, 2005

Business uncertainty

Here's an article on Andy Grove, ex-head of Intel, that deals with managing in uncertainty. I call it the "business uncertainty principle," a borrowing from subatomic physics. The basic idea is that business doesn't progress by adding facts, it progresses by adding constructs. Those constructs are views of the world and determine, in the end, what facts are.

It's all that reinvention talk that guys like Peters make the big bucks talking about. I take it from a thinking perspective. In any event, you can't really mange uncertainty, you can only respond to it in ways that preserve your options. And Grove has a pretty good record of doing this consistently.

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