T-VOL

#TechnicalVirtuosity: The Player is the Special Sauce

Once upon a time, a few clicks back into my youth from now, I fancied myself a fairly decent piano player. That illusion came to an abrupt demise when I met Fred Johnson. On the surface, Fred was as milquetoast-Midwestern as they come. You might have expected hay to fly out of his mouth when he spoke. But, that assessment would have been seriously flawed, as I soon learned. It turns outs that Fred was blessed with perfect pitch, had any number of the very long and complex Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev concertos perfectly lodged in memory, and the speed of someone afflicted with the gift of 25 fingers – and all by the 9th grade. He was a quintessential virtuoso as far as I was concerned. What Fred produced at the same piano and with a quick glance at the same sheet music as I had been laboring over for weeks were two entirely different definitions of music. In short, I would need to discover my own virtuosity away from [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:04:29-04:00November 19th, 2015|Open|

#TechnologyVolatility (T-VOL)

According to Al Pacino, as Coach Tony D’Amato in the movie, Any Given Sunday, “this is a game of inches - the margin for error is so small - and the inches we need are all around us.” With this in mind, it turns out that measuring technology spending in detail represents some of those so-called inches. Personally, I have found such an analysis to yield really incredible and exciting insights – representing more than just a few of those inches. Our TPE Dispersion Analytic – known as T-VOL™ – is one of the better specimen to support such a claim, at least so far. First, let me detangle some of the jargon so that you can see how (potentially) cool and useful this analytic could be: We developed individual models of the largest banks in the world – currently numbering 51 – capturing financial and operational data over the pre- and post-GFC period, 2005 – 2014. For each bank, combining estimated non-human capital (NHC) technology spending with reported headcount [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:03:23-04:00October 27th, 2015|Open|