I concede, Javelin, I am speaking in very general terms. But the truth is, I do not have any specifics to speak about! I have not been inside of an investment back, or spoken to an investment banker, since I was a teenager.


I don't mean to offend anyone, but when the World Trade Centers collapsed - and that huge snow of papers and debris collected in drifts - I was actually tempted to do, like, an archeological dig, to learn more about the specific tools and rituals, and social/organizational patterns of the banker, in the year 2001


So, I wish I could say "take this guy, and teach him to do this," or "put a screen that looks like this on this guy's computer." Then you could say, "You are wrong, that has been tried, here is the specific problem." But as it is, I would be doomed to be wrong - and would lack any specific material to combat your first comeback - and so my being right on general principles would be unduly discredited as a result.


I am convinced there are enormous, unrealized organizational possibilities in finance, and that they could be realized through only the slightest, gradual refinements in the skills and activities of what existing employees are doing today. Put differently, I may paint a cartoon, but if I had the details to fill in, they would be superficially indistingusihable from the details as most people perceive them today. Just move a cup-holder here and there!


What is an even bigger question, in my mind, is why such innovations as I envision haven't been adapted and copied already, in the laboratory of accidents. They would certainly propagate through an instant survival advantage! My suspcicion is that, in the next 10 or 20 years, they will. Already, I am taking note of various organizations whose information topologies seem most likely to evolve into the topologies I envision within the coming years.


It's funny, because the billionaires of tomorrow really are, in many cases, the losers of today. Their advantage will come by no fault of their own, as they have no idea what they are onto, in what direction their current progression of trials and errors will naturally lead them. Meanwhile, you have people like Goldman Sachs, making a conscious effort to move in an unknown direction - by adding Meg Whitman to the board of directors and so forth - and yet there is nothing their big brains and ambitions can do to help them, short of getting lucky!


I feel like one of those naturalists, who makes a film of birds mating and dying in the wild. Sometimes you wish you could grab a bird, and say "Listen, you dumbass, the water's just over there!" But if I were to try that from so far away, and get the location of one tree or hillside wrong, the bird would have to distrust me and end up dying anyway.


eLROY