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Most thoughtful observers understand the capital formation process of our economy is broken. Few understand how the flawed statistics lying at the foundation of “high finance” has led us astray. Perhaps only Boyd and Reardon can illuminate how ergodic thinking shines a light on the path to a prosperous future by aligning our finance with the complexity of how all living systems actually work: in dynamic balance, collaboratively..
-John Fullerton, Founder Capital Institute, author Regenerative Capitalism
What you’ll get
Are you an investor or entrepreneur?
Are you needlessly wasting capital?
And can you do better?
If you answered “yes” to the first, the resounding answer to the second and third is also ‘Yes”!
Whatever you are investing now: your money or a fund’s money; your time, creativity, effort, or relationships; whatever drives you as an entrepreneur, especially if you want to solve humanity’s biggest challenges through net positive, regenerative business; and whatever you expect in return, this book gives you the power to make your own luck, to make our ever more unpredictable world benefit you.
This book gives you what you ought to have been given (but likely weren’t) before you even started your career: the secret to thriving in a volatile, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous world.You begin by working with, not trying to prevent and control, unpredictability. This is one of the hardest challenges you will ever face, because the best strategy — what we call an ergodic strategy — will feel more wrong than anything else you’ve tried. Read The Ergodic Investor and Entrepreneur to know why it is actually so right!
Chapters
Learn which is most important to reach the peak of success, like investing in the next unicorn, creating the next unicorn, or winning a Nobel prize. And find out the reason why companies like Unilever or Procter & Gamble stay steady during unpredicted global headwinds (like Covid-19), while most single-purpose companies experience wild swings. And how this has, is, and will shape your whole life in ways you’re not seeing.
Unknowable unpredictables are the essence of life, but luckily we humans have thrived in the face of it because we learn new strategies when life takes us by surprise. However, business strategies today are no longer fit for our unpredictable world, because we focus on prediction and control. Time for a new strategy, neither aiming for complete control nor completely surrendering to luck.
What you’ve been taught about how capital changes is wrong, because we live in an unpredictable world. A useful business plan must start with capital change processes being multiplicative, and where the order matters. If not, you’re using the wrong equations in building the business plans you’re using to make investment decisions, start your business, or even plan your personal future.
Here are the equations that actually describe real-world capital change processes, multiplicative and order-dependent. You’ll see why business today holds capital like a colander holds water, and what you can do to plug the holes your capital leaks through.
The ergodicity-blind strategies that businesses and investors default to, in order to compensate for the detrimental effects of our non-ergodic world, cause capital to leak away. These all have a role to play in addressing weaknesses in business fundamentals, but are fatally flawed when used to address non-ergodic unpredictables.
In which we test out potential strategies with the power to harness the unpredictables impacting capital, first in a science fiction universe free of key laws of physics to see clearly what might work in reality.
Inspired by the perfect science fiction strategy, you will see what a practical strategy harnessing non-ergodic capital growth looks like — one you can start deploying today in your business or investments.
Excellent execution of an ergodic strategy requires ergodically tuned structures, interactions, and governance. Want to start building them? Fortunately all you need to get started already exists; you just need to use them and optimise them in novel ways.
Bigger is better and the smallest thrive best. Learn how to best execute ergodic strategies by building diverse businesses of widely different sizes, connected together into profit pooling ecosystems, and then connecting those ecosystems.
Ergodic strategies need ergodicity-minded and capable people. Harness the power of unpredictables in your life by applying an ergodic strategy to all of your capitals. Financial, of course. But also your self esteem, relationship, social, intellectual, knowledge, and all the other capitals that you value.
“Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, ‘This could be a good time! There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.’” (Hopi elders prophecy) Here’s a vision of life in a world thriving because entrepreneurs and investors use ergodic strategies.
