This has been a pretty content-rich conference, but today is the day I have been waiting for.
Today, Nicholas Nassim Taleb is the RIMS Leadership Luncheon keynote speaker. If you don’t know who Taleb is, you really ought to.
He is a veteran trader, professor at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute and is best known for his book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, in which he notes that history is largely defined by very low probability, very high impact events, on a scale that suggests such events are so rare as to be unforeseeable, and so severe as to be context altering. It is a book that I have heard more than a few risk managers describe as the risk management manifesto for the 21st century.
Listen up! This man knows risk.
Black Swan events, as defined by Taleb, have been referenced in over 600 books, according to Taleb’s website, and even Taleb himself is under a self-imposed media blackout until May, when the second edition of The Black Swan is released in May with over 100 pages of new content (On Robustness and Fragility). I cannot wait to get a copy.
If you are attending RIMS 2010 Boston, then run, do not walk, to this event and hear this man speak. He has forgotten more about risk than most experts and consultants will ever know. In the meantime, I’m going to leave you with an article he recently published in the Financial Times, entitled “Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world.” Good stuff.
See you this afternoon. He’ll be speaking at the luncheon event, which runs from 12:30 to 2:00. Afterwards, he’ll be signing books at the RIMS booth from 2:15 to 3:00.
Be there.