How Companies & Individuals become Anti-Fragile?

We have heard lots of stories about Chandragupta Maurya, he has been instrumental in shaping the history of ancient India. There are stories of his strategies on playing mind games with the Greeks & his role in the fight against Alexander, but few are aware that he was immune to Poison!

The story goes like this, Chanakya knew that he had to defend and protect Chandragupta Maurya from being killed. He (Chanakya) also anticipated that the enemy could be someone within their camp and inner circle & which means he will use “Faith & Loyalty” to stab in the back i.e. use Poison. He decided to give a very small portion of poison to Chandragupta since his childhood. This made him immune to poison and when Dhanand tried to poison him, he did not die.

You would be wondering why I am sharing lessons of history with you. To answer your question, let me share a concept called “Antifragility” designed by famous author “Taleb Nassim”.

As per Taleb Antifragility can be defined as “Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, despite the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it anti-fragile. Anti-fragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the anti-fragile gets better.”

Some people get better when exposed to difficulties and similarly, some companies get better when exposed to tough times. Companies working on new skills and learning from them will always grow compared to those who play safe.

Some examples of such Anti-Fragile companies:

• Penguin Magic – Generally magic shops do not make money and this is one business in which people generally go bankrupt very soon. One company Penguin Magic” changed this, the sort of company that they invented the internet for. https://www.penguinmagic.com/ . To date, their videos, on the site and on YouTube, have been seen more than a billion times. A billion views with no cost of distribution. They have developed thousands of videos for simple magic tricks, they keep on researching new tricks and every time their competitors copy them, they come up with new tricks.

Toyota- Over the course of 2009/2010 the company was hit by the largest car recall in history and then by a massive tsunami that caused havoc in its supply lines. Toyota has a culture that is based on accepting that crises and disruptions are intrinsic to the world. Rather than be controlled through rigid command structures, employees at all levels are trained daily to be quick problem solvers. In fact, Toyota has almost completely reinvented itself in recent years, committing $1 billion to five-year robotics and AI project based in Silicon Valley. They designed prototypes of home care and hospital robots for some time and have just started selling its Kirobo Mini robot — a $400, 10 cm tall baby companion in a country (Japan) with plummeting birth rates.

Disruptions and Black Swan events tend to make us stronger, we can learn from them and emerge as Anti-Fragile.