Fractals LO4141

John Conover (john@johncon.johncon.com)
Thu, 7 Dec 1995 20:40:54 -0800

Replying to LO4137 --

Rol Fessenden writes:
> As a former mathematician, I can guess you must have had lots of fun with
> this. Your comments on inventory management ring true to me, and I have
> long thought we should be looking at inventory through the lens of chaos
^^^^^

Although it was not mentioned, there is, apparently, a chaotic game
involved. The Hurst diagrams showed a 5.5 year cycle. (Waiting around
5 and half years for the P&L to prosper probably is not an exploitable
strategy.) I don't know why-but it was definitely there. Prevailing
econ. theory states that it should be coherent with the election
cycle, but the graphs don't support the premiss. Peters noticed the
same thing in the capital markets.

> theory. We need the right theoretician to put this on a sound footing.
>
> There is, however, an inherent conflict between product development cycles
> (not product life cycles) and your thoughts that strategic planning should
> perhaps not be "long term." Your analysis is correct. Visibility into
> the future is no more than 2-3 months in general. As a consequence, the
> goal of strategic planning should be to create flexibility so that an
> organization knows how to respond to upredictable changes in ways that
> further the corporate purpose.
>

That was supposed to be the premiss of what I did-to develop a
flexible and extensible strategy to accommodate the unpredictability,
(or more correctly, un-forecastability,) of the market dynamics. There
are, apparently, depending on your POV optimal rules to follow when
deriving such a strategy. Now, whether my conclusions are the correct
rules or not is another issue.

John

-- 

John Conover, 631 Lamont Ct., Campbell, CA., 95008, USA. VOX 408.370.2688, FAX 408.379.9602 john@johncon.com