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 enlarge | Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $27.00
Buy New: $15.15
You Save: $11.85 (44%)
New (50) Used (19) Collectible (2) from $14.74
Avg. Customer Rating:  352 reviews
Sales Rank: 108
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 1400063515
Dewey Decimal Number: 003.54
EAN: 9781400063512
ASIN: 1400063515
Publication Date: April 17, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Black Swans In American Industries August 23, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
A very interesting concept and I believe, a very true phenomena that exists in every walk of life. As a corporate human resources director, black swans can bring disastrous results if proper planning is not in place. While most of my career has been mundane to say the least, the periods where I experienced `Extremistan' were the times when great change happened either in my career or within the organization I was employed by.
Teaching your managers and leaders about the concept of black swans will result in positive benefits for your organization that are invaluable. In fact, grasping the black swan theory may even save the organization from ultimate failure.
This may not be viewed by many as a management book. These people would be wrong. Combined with Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything a leader in the management world will be fortified with the tools needed to survive the trips to Extremistan. Michael L. Gooch, SPHR Author of Wingtips with Spurs
 Good info, good ideas, but got bored and couldn't finish it... August 21, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
As far as I got, it all seemed to make sense. The bell-curve IS inadequate. Ok, that's fine. And there are some great examples. There are plenty of reviews here that will give you all the goodies.
But all in all I have to say that there was a lot of clutter. If you're going to buy this book READ THE PREFACE, everything just clicks better.
Still many things seem irrelevant, or perhaps the connection was not explained enough. Lots of repetition. My overall sense is that it could have been shorter and to the point.
Needless to say, I liked as far as I got. I just felt that I had enough information and that reading the rest would just be repeating the beginning. Still, I'm happy I bought it and got as far as I did. The insight is good, and useful. So if the subject interests you, give it a try and hopefully you'll make it ot the end.
 Disaster Planning for Black Swans August 18, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I have found Mr. Taleb's book to be a very interesting and thought provoking read. As an experienced emergency management professional and instructor, I find it calls into question the whole process of risk and hazard analysis. While the book is certainly intellectually stimulating and should cause one to be very careful with planning assumptions, I question its value in any direct application. While looking in the rear view mirror we don't know how many Black Swan's were prevented by well conducted risk and hazard analyses based on historical occurrences. As Mr. Taleb points out, history has overlooked the successful interventions and un-occurred disasters.
 Nothing useful that anyone in a scientific field would benefit from August 16, 2008
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
Talebs point is painfully simple. For some reason he seems to think that it is very unique and it is almost laughable that he thinks people in academia are so near sighted as to not realize much of what he presents.
He fails to provide any new model for evaluating risk... It's obvious that we can't predict the future, yes markets could collapse if a nuke hit america... or some other "Black Swan" occurrence happened. But the fact is we can't really practically use any of these events to model risk.
One example I found to be pretty stupid was when he talked about the banking crisis (where South American countries all simultaneously defaulted on their loans) ... and implied that this meant that "bankers were not conservative". His basic vice is that many strategies produce very little volatility yet still contain chaotic possibility of an extremely large loss. Unfortunately he never offered a practical alternative to what conservative should be defined as. Humans have limited tools to evaluate risk, I think everyone realizes that our models aren't perfect (yet unfortunately Taleb seems to think that he is the only one that has had this insight). This pattern occurs throughout the book -- Taleb chastising people for wrongly evaluating future occurrences without offering any practical alternative.
I didn't buy a book simply be told that ... "well...humans aren't oracles they can't predict stuff...sometimes crazy stuff goes down... here are some examples... oh yeah and some advice: Be open minded"... which in essence is what this book wastes 400 pages doing.
What a bloated and wasted work August 15, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
I got interested in this book in part because the topic interested me and in part because I have seen far too many random people including boston cab drivers and random passerby reading this book. I am uncertain why this book ever caught on, as it is written without any style and with long rambling bits as well as poorly executed stylistic techniques. It seems to me at least, that the success of this book is in and of itself a very negative black swan.
First, I want to take intellectual umbrage with some of the events Mr. Taleb describes as unpredictable. The book got of to a bad start by immediately sighting 9-11 as an unpredictable event. Unfortunately, this is clearly not the factual case as there were many precedents in the realm of plane high jackings and much evidence including the bin laden determined to strike the U.S memo of August 2001 to suggest an imminent attack. The problems with our intelligence communities were quite many including information sharing flaws and execution errors especially in collaboration, but the threats we faced were never completely unpredictable. Of course, Taleb is correct when he says that conventional thinking was at fault for many of our intelligence mistakes, however, the problem at least in regard to national security ( a field Taleb claims to respect later in the book) is that we mostly deal with limited resources to respond to near infinite quantities of threats. Moreover, the conventional and probable ( the assassination of JFK in Dallas) has just as much impact as the highly improbable. This is not exactly the black swan situation Taleb speaks of and it seems that at least when it comes to policy direction, his theory is lacking.
Stylistically, this book is filled with poor choices such as the french baiting so in vogue when this book came out which now is just utterly irritating, the use of hypothetical or imaginary cases rather than interesting real world example, the continuous referral back to past chapters through the use of their numbers, as if Taleb expects his tome to be judiciously memorized, a curious portion in which Taleb practically gushes about specific philosophers or mathematicians such as mandelbrot ( very awkward) and the continuous assertions of the author that he is different and unique from everyone around. The content of this book gets lost in a muddled layer of arrogance and repetition. The point of this book could much more easily be told with concrete examples and less narcissism and redundancy.
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