There is a notion in business that is often useful, but rarely observed – the idea of signal and noise, or rather being able to distinguish between the two. The not-remotely-new point I’m making – well illustrated in Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s not-remotely-new book, Fooled by Randomness – is that in making informed decisions, leaders should endeavour to shut out the ‘noise’ of short-term, rapidly changing information, which is typically near worthless.
