Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

[LONDON] There was a sharp intake of collective breath last night in the British Library when Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, announced the winner of this year's Best Business Book of the Year Award: The Last Tycoons by William D Cohan. "Unexpected", to put it mildly, was the typical reaction. Hours before the 9.30 pm announcement, the smart money was tipping towards Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams, and Zoom by Iain Carson and Vijay Vaitheeswaran was said to be picking up speed on the inside. Then, the surprise victor. A Black Swan, as it were. However, having spent until 2 am reading The Last Tycoons, the verdict here is that it was a worthy winner. The rise of Lazard Frères is a fascinating story about money, power and politics and Cohan tells it brilliantly.

One of the highlights of the evening was meeting Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan. Taleb's work covers an astonishing array of knowledge fields while delivering stimulating ideas of every one of its pages. He intoxicates us with epistemology before sobering us up with statistics. Often, he's just playful: "We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don't seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion."

In The Black Swan, Taleb makes the bold claim that "our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable" and he scolds us for spending our time "focusing on the known, and the repeated." For those who think they can sleep soundly at night because they've got those life insurance policies and believe that their nest egg rests safely on a bed of blue chips, he proffers this chilling warning: "...in spite of our progress and the growth in knowledge, or perhaps because of such progress and growth, the future will be increasingly less predictable."

The Black Swan is, as its title suggests, an elegant rara avis. By the way, if you don't have the time to read it, get the next issue of Business Spotlight. It will feature a highly entertaining assessment of the book. Juvenal, George Clooney and Siegfried & Roy all play roles in the portrait.