There is a morning meeting for the whole trading floor (with participation from Japan), delivered over the stentor and another global (that means London and New York) meeting at seven thirty New York time. Everybody is part of a small desk, but there are unofficial, unwritten and constantly revised protocols for how the desks will interact. Everybody sits in one room and within earshot of each other. The swaps desk, in turn, can 100% count on immediate execution of bond and futures hedges from seamlessly (often electronically) connected bond and bond futures desks. The syndicate desk can count 100% on multiple sales desks to place the new issue and it can count 100% on the swaps desk to take away all market-directional risk the client would otherwise bear. The syndicate desk will act as the new bond’s midwife, guiding the issuer as to the best pricing and timing and carries the eventual risk of any unplaced bonds on its books. The desks acknowledge each other and work together seamlessly to do transactions that cut across more than one specialties.Įxample: Suppose a new issue needs to be brought to market. There’s as many desks as there are products to trade. Each trader specializes in a very narrow set of securities or derivatives he knows inside out and each can count on his buddies to cover for him out of his own book when the circumstances dictate he should. I’ve spent more than twenty years on trading floors, here’s how it all works:Įach desk is comprised of three to eight traders who know each other well, have worked together for years and trust each other blindly. 74), “unpredictability is fundamentally incompatible with reductionist managerial models based around planning and prediction.” To defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, the military would have to move from “doing things right” to “doing the right thing.” This was not going to be about refining a process down to the last detail, but about having the right people in the right place armed with the right information and letting them figure it out. No matter how strong his navy SEALS or Army Special Forces were, “whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of interface failures.” (p. McChrystal woke up to the fact that he was facing complexity every bit as much as a trading floor does that’s pricing tens of deals for tens of types of customers at the same time and that the top-down structure was not fit for purpose in Iraq. Either there’s somebody ready to be deployed in the field who can react in real time and feed back all intelligence in real time to other assets in the battlefield (marketplace) who will act upon it in real time, or you may as well give up. When you have to respond to a distributed network of terrorists (or are put in a "winner's curse" competition with other dealers to buy or sell a bond) you cannot plan your reaction. The general implemented the trading floor business model on the battlefield in Iraq because he had to. This is the story of how General Stanley McChrystal brought Wall Street trading floor working practices (which have existed for decades) to the battlefield in Iraq. 'A bold argument that leaders can help teams become greater than the sum of their parts' Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit 'An indispensable guide to organizational change' Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs Through compelling examples, the authors demonstrate that the 'team of teams' strategy has worked everywhere from hospital emergency rooms to NASA and has the potential to transform organizations large and small. In this powerful book, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be relevant to any leader. Faster, flatter and more flexible, the task force beat back al-Qaeda. McChrystal and his colleagues discarded a century of conventional wisdom to create a 'team of teams' that combined extremely transparent communication with decentralized decision-making authority. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment and training - but none of the enemy's speed and flexibility. What if you could combine the agility, adaptability, and cohesion of a small team with the power and resources of a giant organization? When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq in 2003, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |