New Term

We just started the third term at Fuqua this weekend. I’m finding the classes for this term to be quite interesting at this point. Finance is more math than expected (lots of applications of geometric series algebra). There was a light bulb moment in the management class. The lecture (and case study reading) were about issues in group decisions. The plusses and minuses of this method were discussed. One of the minuses was groupthink, which has a much more specific meaning in decision theory. The lightbulb went off when our instructor listed the symptoms of group think. Of the 5 indicators, 4 were in effect at siXis. Taken with the fact that we choose such a bad time to launch the company relative to the economy, it can be argued that we programmed to fail.

The other thought that went through my head was some of the political process implications of the bias effect that Dr. Fisher spoke to in class. He demonstrated that when there is a systemic bias in the group members, that poor decision are the result. I found myself thinking about a belief that humans do a poor job of assessing risk, that we overweight it. To the extent that this is true (which I believe is the case), then a democratic decision making process is going to always overreact to risk. I think about this relative to fears of nuclear power and other important social issues that face the US.