The right thing

Most people go about their lives doing their jobs, making money, somehow convincing themselves that they are doing the right thing. But look at a random sample of things being done by companies, individuals, etc. and within minutes you will see how meaningless their goals are. Whenever it comes time to evaluate oneself critically, people take solace in comparing themselves with someone more depraved than themselves, at least in the general public's eyes. I am much better than that evil suicide bomber that killed fifty people, they say to themselves, and feel strangely comforted by that thought. After all, if not for the existence of someone much 'worse' than themselves, wouldnt they be the ones at the receiving end of the criticism for their unjustified zombied walk through life? Maybe the question of the right thing to do has no answer. But then someone should prove that to be the case and document it for posterity, so we can all feel a little better doing what we do.

Let us consider the field of investment - the main purpose of this domain's existence is to answer the question: what is the ideal investment strategy for an investor or group of investors of a given investment mindset. Ideally, the industry should be converging towards solving that problem. There have been great contributors to the domain. Economics thinkers and writers like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Marshall, Veblen, Galbraith, Milton Friedman and Todd Buccholz, Investment thinkers and writers such as Ben Graham, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Philip Fisher, John Burr Williams, Burton Malkiel, Aswath Damodaran, Zvi Bodie, cross domain thinkers like Mauboussin, have all contributed greatly to approaching the problem. Even if we consider 1776, when Adam Smith wrote his famous 'wealth of nations', as the beginning of such thought, we have less than one person on average every 15 years, not a great number considering the amount that has been said about the subject. The larger danger lurks in the increase in flimsy opinion available in today's world. Today, with TV, the internet and other such space and time gap shortening technologies, almost anyone can publish anything. And success in the publishing industry is a measure of several things other than just plain quality of the content. So, a person with excellent articulation and writing skills and the wrong content can be very successful at spreading the wrong message. A person with the right message but poor communication skills will very likely go unheard. However, we cannot blame the perpetrator of wrong investment methodologies, as he may be successful at his goal of making money off of online advertisement or collecting money upfront for a get rich overnight scheme. In order to find an answer to the problem of investment, I would argue that more time is needed to sift out bad content than to find the good ones. In fact, the list of resources needed by a person with a rational and analytical mind is quite obvious. And yet people are all busy coming up with ways to make a quick buck, as opposed to solving the fundamental problem of investment.

Let us consider the question of technology - what problems must the software industry solve today to be most beneficial to each breed of customer? If you look at many of the software companies today, it does not seem like they accept this as the primary question - instead, like a group of ants collected from their ant hill and dropped off in the middle of a distant desert, they are scared, and do the only thing they know to do - scamper. Each ant scampers in his own direction, and then does what he has to do to continue scampering - justifies why that direction is better than the other, moves more firmly in that direction. We are in the umpteenth release of operating systems and web browsers, and we still havent solved fundamental problems of interoperability. When I plug my music player into my computer, every hour or so, I get the blue screen with a cryptic error, and after having judiciously bought each new release of operating systems, computers and software for the last decade and a half.

Similar questions can be asked about business - what is the right approach to a business model in a given domain? or employment - what is the right kind of work to do as a function of a person's characteristics? or buying - what product should I buy? or environment - what is the best approach to address global warming?

It is critical to answer these questions honestly before jumping ahead to do something based on the more common reasons - because others are doing it, because I said I'd do it this way, or because the media thinks its cool.