The Art of Hunter-Gathering in the Digital Age

Hunter-gatherers essentially had four gears:

• Neutral: Sleep and social nit picking.
• Slow: Foraging for fruit.
• Fast: Pursuing lunch.
• Flat out: When becoming something’s lunch is imminent.

Investment banks tend to operate on this basis:

• Neutral: Outside trading hours.
• Slow: Searching for trading opportunities.
• Fast: Capitalising on a market movement.
• Flat out: Dumping positions that could destroy the bank.

More generally organisation’s need to resist the tendency to respond to the frenetic market conditions by in turn behaving frenetic 24-7. It burns people out. It leads to knee-jerk decision-making and a myopic market perspective.

Even the Emergency services don’t behave as if there is a continuous emergency.

Operating continuously at high speeds is lazy. It implies that your leadership is unable or uninterested in sensing the subtle shifts in the market, the granularity of which was years and is now hours.

It might just be that our hunter gather ancestors had better market analytics tools.