In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!

If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.

Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.

If you're going to fail, you'd rather fail early than fail late in general.

Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks-when one fails, they all fall. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought.

It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.