Davos

I’ve never taken much notice of the World Economic Forum at Davos.

The reason for this is one Malcolm J. Thompson, a former business colleague.

Malcolm had what could only be described as an inferiority complex.

I suspect this had driven him towards the moderate success in his career which included numerous failed startups and a stint as the head of Xerox Labs in Silicon Valley (or near equivalent; my memory doesn’t care).

Not that the failure of startups is necessarily a bad thing; just so long as they fail due to recognised and accepted risk factors outside the control of the CEO, board and investors.

Malcolm used to regale me with his memories of Davos. A full time networker, Malcolm had managed to get a Guernsey one year.

My assumption thereafter has been that Davos was full of Malcolms or near equivalents.

In which case the only function of Davos is to give the Malcolms of the world both an excuse and a reason to be a Malcolm.

So, if you notice any business leader that turns up to Davos more than once, then you’d be good to short their company.

In fact, a shit business leader is effectively a cargo-cultist – they adopt the habits of what they presume good business leaders have.

But in this replicating of circumstances associated with great outcomes they don’t realise that these circumstances are either unrelated to the causes of outcomes or insufficient to produce them by themselves.

Or they just adopt the wrong habits.

So if one wanted to figure out which companies to short, all you have to do is study the measurable habits (like being a repeat attendee at Davos) of business leaders that have failed miserably in the past .

Then you write a program to track the habits of current business leaders and use the algorithm developed from the lessons learned from the habits of past failed CEOs to get early identification of the current idiot CEOs, ahead of their certain failure.

Exhibit A below