Beating the Global Odds: Successful Decision-making in a Confused and Troubled World

Chapter 2

Fast and Fickle

The Ever-Shorter Half-Life of Everything

It’s not the speed that kills you, but the sudden stop.

—Rüdiger Dornbusch,late MIT economist

Global capital markets pose the same kinds of problems that jet planes do. They are faster, more comfortable, and they get you where you are going better. But the crashes are much more spectacular.

—Larry Summers, twenty-seventh President of Harvard University and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury

The gleaming new Lehman Brothers Europe headquarters in London opened in 2004, and in 2010 auction house Christie’s sold two signs from there for £70,800 as souvenirs from the financial wreckage. As a Christie’s executive said, “The attraction lies in the car-crash element.”

SOURCE: Thomson Reuters.

It’s hard to believe now, but in the early twentieth century, a number of artistic movements regarded speed, noise, motion, machines, crowds, and even industrial pollution as thrilling and liberating—the Italian Futurists, the British Vorticists, the American designers of sleek, streamlined locomotives and gleaming propeller aircraft. (Tiffany still sells a line of jewelry called Streamerica based on the aesthetics of speed from the time when ocean liners where breaking Transatlantic records.)

In our own time, we find velocity more unsettling—and destabilizing. For example, in the blink of an eye, Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia ...