Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Rubin, Robert. Commencement Speech at Harvard, 2001.

Added to Online Library.

"I doubt if Kant or Spinoza viewed themselves as offering the best and more important preparation for risk arbitrage or for intervention in the dollar/yen foreign exchange market or for the many other activities of a finance minister. But, in my view, they did. Looking back on all my years in the private and public sectors, in the most important issues, certainties were almost always illusory and misleading, as were the simple answers or opinions that often were the response to the complicated issues in both political discourse and the private sector. Reality is complex, and recognizing complexity and engaging with complexity was the path to best decision-making."
...
"An important corollary to recognizing that decisions are about probabilities is that decisions should not be judged by outcomes but by the quality of the decision-making, though outcomes are certainly one useful input in that evaluation.. Any individual decisions can be badly thought through, and yet be successful, or exceedingly well thought through, but be unsuccessful, because the recognized possibility of failure in fact occurs. But over time, more thoughtful decision-making will lead to better overall results, and more thoughtful decision-making can be encouraged by evaluating decisions on how well they were made rather than on outcome. In managing trading rooms, I always focused on evaluating and promoting traders not on their results alone, but also and very importantly, on the thinking that underlay their decisions. Unfortunately, this approach is not widely taken, much to the detriment of decision-making in both the private and public sectors."

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