Tag: Outliers

I happened to be reading Malcom Gladwell’s excellent book, Outliers, just as MF Global was collapsing, and I came across Gladwell’s discussion about another kind of crash – those involving airplanes. Gladwell offers an interesting observation about the causes of air disasters that could apply to the failures at financial firms, like MF Global, or the whopping trading losses reported two months ago at UBS. Gladwell shows that air disasters aren’t caused by a sudden, dramatic mishap but an accumulation of small errors rooted in poor communication: “The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors.  One of ... Read More