Financial industry executives generally got the messages of被随机性所迷惑和黑天鹅, the books published in 2001 and 2007, respectively, that brought Nassim Nicholas Taleb to prominence as a philosopher of markets, volatility and probability. They were not easy reads, and their warnings of impending doom didn’t prevent the meltdown of 2008–’09. But they were bestsellers that established Taleb, distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering, as one of the leading public intellectuals in finance, quantitative and otherwise.
Books with such far-reaching business implications spawn others that bring theoretical concepts down to the practical level. InStalking the Black Swan(2010), longtime Morgan Stanley specialty finance analyst Kenneth Posner advises looking beyond the rare, catastrophic shocks that are the black swans of Taleb’s title: those that are not predictable through conventional extrapolation of historical data but need to be factored in if future crises are to be avoided. Posner calls investors’ attention to “plenty of smaller, more mundane swans, whipsawing individual stocks and sectors even when the rest of the market is calm” — and the risks and opportunities they present.
Taleb勉强提及资本的DAO（2013年），由Mark Spitznagel的备忘录和自由市场宣言，但是这本书的谱系很清楚：Taleb建议Spitznagel的迈阿密大学的大学投资于两个前坑交易员的15年关系。
公共反应对Taleb 2012的热情不太热情抗皱：从紊乱中获得的东西。（U.K. Edition有一个不同的字幕：How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand。）音量是密集的，后续文献稀疏。Taleb的“不确定的巨大和非常重要的工作”具有“美妙的深远后果 - 尽管是不太直接的，但对于资本投资，”Spitznagel写道The资本道。
Antifragileis high-concept, to be sure. Taleb is not merely saying that systems and organizations need to be better able to withstand inevitable shocks and crises. He believes antifragility is a built-in trait or characteristic of systems that adapt and strengthen through adversity. Antifragile systems “benefit from volatility,” the scholar has said. When stressed, the antifragile becomes more resilient, whereas the fragile bends and breaks.
It did not help Taleb’s cause that there were few, if any, practical and independent interpretations of antifragility. It seems applicable to any number of systemic challenges. In a July 13, 2009,金融时报commentary co-authored with Spitznagel, Taleb said that “debt and leverage cause fragility” in the economic system as a whole. “The only solution is to transform debt into equity across all sectors, in an organized and systemic way” — to introduce antifragility, as Taleb would argue over time.
Perhaps improbably, and with no encouragement from Taleb, a U.K.-based consultant is championing antifragility. Presenting it as a potentially grand unification of management and systems theory, Tony Bendell, founder of服务Ltd。并退休劳斯莱斯 - 莱斯特大学莱斯特大学质量和可靠性管理教授Building Anti-Fragile Organisations: Risk, Opportunity and Governance in a Turbulent World今年夏天早些时候。他七个月大的防脆性学院提供教育计划。
Bendell对Taleb的书的看法不会使其成为一个封面模糊：“精美，但绝望地难以阅读，而不是用户友好，”他告诉亚博赞助欧冠。但这并没有掩盖昙花一现：“这个概念是关于我职业生涯中遇到的最基本的事情。”
An expert in Six Sigma and other performance-enhancement methodologies, Bendell has spent most of his career focusing on how to improve organizations. Taleb, he explains, did not directly address the fact that “we have a very patchy methodology in the quality improvement/quality excellence movement. It’s a mixture of strategy and risk and operations that is not coherent. The antifragility concepts brought a coherence or unification that I hadn’t thought about before. I had to start thinking about hierarchies of risk in a way that I hadn’t thought about before.”
Bendell believes he and others have only scratched the surface of antifragility and how to implement it, but there is no shortage of need for it. “Most of our global systems, the way they have been put together, are potentially very fragile,” he says. “The way our financial system operates is fundamentally fragile. Decision-making processes are quite fragile.”
His book proposes approaches in such areas as corporate culture, operations management and supply chains. Bendell says he may deal with more macro issues, like financial regulation, in his next book.
He invited a banker, State Bank of India’s U.K. regional head Mrutyunjay Mahapatra, to touch on that in a foreword: “Capital as the omnibus prescription of anti-fragility is either untenable or unsustainable because of its limited supply or because no one knows how much is enough. In such a circumstance, an investment in knowing about anti-fragility is probably the best bet.”