Project Management

This is the final part to my notes and reflections on the book, Antifragile, by Nassim Taleb. Part one covered such things as skin in the game, the principle-agent problem, fragility of optimisation and convexity effects, and the power of options over deterministic thinking.

I think my work colleagues and friends are now bored of me raving about the book Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. My reading style is to read very slowly, mulling over each sentence again and again. When a book is this dense I also tend to make notes. Here they are below, from the point of view of a consultant and a numerical modeller. Some examples are taken straight out of the book whilst others are ones I have personally encountered that illustrate concepts the book raises.

I almost didn’t write this post because the topic of file organisation is incredibly boring for most people (including me). What did drive me to write was a few horrendous projects where the end result was a soup of files where much time was wasted deciphering what file was in use and where it came from. Especially for long-running projects with multiple authors, what generally results is what my previous geologist coworkers used to call “stratigraphic filing”: a time-based layering of work, within files, across versions and across a folder structure that seemed a good idea at the time.