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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (52512)	7/19/2009 12:33:35 PM
From: prosperous	3 Recommendations Respond to of 217840

This reminds me of an excerpt from a famous book "good to great" (see link below) by Jim Collins, management prof at Stanford, who described the Stockdale paradox. Admiral Stockdale was Vietnam veteran who was POW from 1965-73. The following comments (in bold) he made in an interview with Jim Collins about optimists are interesting . en.wikipedia.org It seems current financial situation parallels that, we are at an inflection point and not in a normal garden variety recession, the optimists calling Green shoots will get tired of calling recovery, wither, and vanish if they do not realize brutal reality of the situation. The real problem is that the ones propagating the recovery myth are aware of the brutal facts and misleading; for the masses who believe in it the result will be to their detriment. Between stocks, real estate, currency, and jobs the govt has, in their infinite wisdom, tried to kept alive the former two and let go of the latter two. One could argue that an exact opposite would work better than the current path. Putting faith in the chosen path at this point would be tantamount to blind optimism at its worst. In a business book by James C. Collins called Good to Great, Collins writes about a conversation he had with Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during his period in the Vietnamese POW camp.[3] "I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade."[4] When Collins asked who didn't make it out, Stockdale replied: "Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart."[4] Stockdale then added: "This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”[4] Witnessing this philosophy of duality, Collins went on to describe it as the Stockdale Paradox.