Can Gencer

I remember Taleb saying somewhere in the distant past, when he was still exceptionally sane, something like "When you can do a few thing very well, you can afford a lot of mistakes". I came to appreciate this heavy-tailedness of positive payoffs only later. *Every single firm* I have worked at was dysfunctional, in the precise sense that goals that were part of their core mission were obviously, scandalously fumbled. Stuff like "let's start a business in , for which were are completely unsuited!" or "let's fix the risk department by doubling its size!" and so on. All of this, by executives who were also obviously very intelligent and well-intentioned. How can this be? Because they had a core at which they were among the top three in the world. Even when they ignored that core competency, it saved them over and over again.

Sometimes I can add hacks, or patches, or even do some refactoring to remove problems, but it's a legacy system with a lot of technical debt. So are most of our critical systems. But you know what Corey says: legacy is another word for profit-generating.