Surviving this economy

Allow me to introduce myself.

My name is Matt Heusser, and I run a software risk management company. I frequently walk into companies that are having performance or quality problems, which show up as risks. Sometimes the risks have manifested, or 100% chance of quality problem. The companies look to me as an outsider to see what they cannot see, then advise on how to fix it. Sometimes I stick around to see the changes through. Most of that work is in IT, and often the largest IT problem then can see is testing, but that doesn’t really matter. How I do the work matters.

Through my work I end up modeling the organization as a system — almost a living organism. There is some variability, some things change over time, but the outcomes are generally predictable. Once we understand how the machinery work we figure out where we could go, map it out, look at the long term consequences, and see if we like the predicted results. After that, we prove the theory will small experiments.

That’s not that different from how economists map the economy.

Like many of you, I have been trying to steer in this crazy world. My bitcoin investment, for example, is up 300% since I put in a small experiment in May. That is crazy. Real asset prices do not really quadruple in eight months. Instead, something else is usually going on, like the Hunt Brothers buying up the market for silver in the 1980’s. That was a bubble, and of course it had to break.