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Quantified Strategy
Decreased uncertainty, improved decisions
Global Advisors is a leader in defining quantified strategies, decreasing uncertainty, improving decisions and achieving measureable results.
We specialise in providing highly-analytical data-driven recommendations in the face of significant uncertainty.
We utilise advanced predictive analytics to build robust strategies and enable our clients to make calculated decisions.
We support implementation of adaptive capability and capacity.
Our latest
Thoughts
Global Advisors’ Thoughts: Empathy and understanding – why they are the qualities that help us achieve our own happiness and success
By Marc Wilson
Our team had just finished a book review presentation on Dale Carnegie’s “Making Friends and Influencing People”. Jane (*name changed) looked troubled: “Isn’t this stuff about manipulating people?”
Therein lies a paradox in showing empathy: without empathy for others, you face less influence, friendship, love and success. But if those are your goal rather than the sincere care for others, then your empathy is not really empathy at all.
Many people might react to empathy as “soft.” But empathy is a mark of incredible strength. It dares us to care. It requires us to put ourselves to one side. It requires us to be vulnerable – otherwise all we are doing is showing sympathy. Empathy requires self-awareness and skill.
Sympathy is easy. Sympathy does not go as far as empathy – it keeps us distant from the situation someone else is experiencing. It places us in danger of being condescending. Empathy requires us to put our self into their situation as them – not us.
Empathy gets the best out of those around us – and opens us up to be a better version of ourselves.
I find it incredibly difficult to manage a balance. A balance of being sufficiently confident and willing to share my own experience in an unbiased and helpful way – while removing enough of myself to allow someone else to find their own path and live their own experience. To be an empathetic leader, I believe I need to care about my team being at their best at work and in life.
Skills such as active listening are important to remove ourselves from the coaching we give others. But I think empathy requires us to be authentically present and involved in a way that facilitating someone else’s own solution does not.
Empathetic leadership challenges me to use my own experience and position in a way that is open to the challenges and experiences of others. And most critically demonstrates that I act out of care and acknowledgement of them.
Empathy requires that we know our self well enough that we are able to remove our projections of our own biases and feelings from the situation, appreciate the other person’s view of the world and how that impacts the situation for them.
Think about how you respond to others. How often do you respond to their experience, feelings and fears based on your own fears? Do your responses contain the word “I?” Do you fear genuinely experiencing the world as them? Do you seek to affirm your own view and experience through your response? Are you scared as being seen as similar to the other person in their own “deficiencies” and “imperfections”? How many of these imperfections are merely your own biases and fears?
Read more by clicking here: http://www.globaladvisors.biz/thoughts/20170627/empathy-and-understanding-why-they-are-the-qualities-that-help-us-achieve-our-own-happiness-and-success
Strategy Tools
Strategy Tools: The Growth-Share Matrix
The Growth-Share Matrix was introduced almost 50 years ago by Bruce Henderson and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). It is considered one of the most iconic strategic planning techniques.
The Growth-Share Matrix is a framework first developed in the 1960s to help companies think about the priority (and resources) that they should give to their different businesses. At the height of its success, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Growth-Share Matrix (or approaches based on it) was used by about half of all Fortune 500 companies, according to estimates.
The need which prompted The Growth-Share idea was, indeed, that of managing cash-flow. It was reasoned that one of the main indicators of cash generation was relative market share, and one which pointed to cash usage was that of market growth rate:
“To be successful, a company should have a portfolio of products with different growth rates and different market shares. The portfolio composition is a function of the balance between cash flows. High growth products require cash inputs to grow. Low growth products should generate excess cash. Both kinds are needed simultaneously.”—Bruce Henderson.
The two axes of the matrix are relative market share (or the ability to generate cash) and growth (or the need for cash).
For each product or service, the “area” of the circle represents the value of its sales. The growth–share matrix thus offers a “map” of the organization’s product (or service) strengths and weaknesses, at least in terms of current profitability, as well as the likely cashflows.
The matrix puts each of a firm’s businesses into one of four categories. The categories were all given memorable names – cash cow, star, dog and question mark – which helped to push them into the collective consciousness of managers all over the world.
Fast Facts
Going niche is not always a viable strategy for South African manufacturers
- Niche food markets are relatively small in South Africa when craft beer, pure-ground coffee, Fairtrade coffee and organic foods are used as proxies.
- According to Global Advisors analysis, niche products account for between 0,38% and 19,60% of total market volumes and have a potential consumer size of just over 900 000 adults if Gauteng, Kwazulu-Natal and the Western Cape are targeted.
- Companies within the niche market space must therefore carefully consider the size of their particular niche market, in terms of the potential volumes that they should produce, the number of potential consumers, in terms of the targeted LSM group, and where these consumers are located.
- For companies already producing mass market products, niche products might require a different business model and could become a distraction to their core product offerings.
- The size of these niche sectors are expected to increase in South Africa in the near future due to the rise of the middle-class.
Selected News
Term: Stablecoin
“A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a stable value, unlike volatile assets like Bitcoin, by pegging its price to a stable reserve asset, usually a fiat currency (like the USD) or a commodity (like gold).” – Stablecoin
What is a Stablecoin?
A **stablecoin** is a type of cryptocurrency engineered to preserve a consistent value relative to a specified asset, such as a fiat currency (e.g., the US dollar), a commodity (e.g., gold), or a basket of assets, in stark contrast to the high volatility of assets like Bitcoin.
Unlike traditional cryptocurrencies, stablecoins employ stabilisation mechanisms including reserve assets held by custodians or algorithmic protocols that adjust supply and demand to sustain the peg. Fiat-backed stablecoins, the most common variant, mirror money market funds by holding reserves in short-term assets like treasury bonds, commercial paper, or bank deposits. Commodity-backed stablecoins peg to physical assets like gold, while cryptocurrency-backed ones, such as DAI or Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), use overcollateralised crypto reserves managed via smart contracts on decentralised networks.
Types of Stablecoins
- Fiat-backed: Centralised issuers hold equivalent fiat reserves (e.g., USD) to support 1:1 redeemability.
- Commodity-backed: Pegged to commodities, with issuers maintaining physical reserves.
- Cryptocurrency-backed: Collateralised by other cryptocurrencies, often overcollateralised to buffer volatility.
- Algorithmic: Rely on smart contracts to dynamically adjust supply without full reserves, though prone to failure.
Despite the name, stablecoins are not immune to depegging, as evidenced by historical failures amid market stress or redemption pressures, potentially triggering systemic risks akin to fire-sale contagions in traditional finance. They facilitate rapid, low-cost blockchain transactions, serving as a bridge between fiat and crypto ecosystems for payments, settlements, and trading.
Regulatory Landscape
Governments worldwide are intensifying oversight due to stablecoins’ growing role in transactions. For instance, Nebraska’s Financial Innovation Act (2021, updated 2024) permits digital asset depositories to issue stablecoins backed by reserves in FDIC-insured institutions.
Key Theorist: Robert Shiller and the Conceptual Foundations
The most relevant strategy theorist linked to stablecoins is **Robert Shiller**, a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose pioneering work on financial stability, behavioural finance, and asset pricing underpins the economic rationale for pegged digital assets. Shiller’s theories address the volatility that stablecoins explicitly counter, positioning them as practical applications of stabilising speculative markets.
Born in 1946 in Detroit, Michigan, Shiller earned his PhD in economics from MIT in 1972 under advisor Robert Solow. He joined Yale University in 1982, where he remains the Sterling Professor of Economics. Shiller gained prominence for developing the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, a leading US housing market benchmark. His seminal book, Irrational Exuberance (2000), presciently warned of the dot-com bubble and later the 2008 financial crisis, critiquing how narratives drive asset bubbles.
Shiller’s relationship to stablecoins stems from his advocacy for financial innovations that mitigate volatility. In works like Finance and the Good Society (2012), he explores stabilising mechanisms such as index funds and derivatives, which parallel stablecoin pegs by tethering values to underlying assets. He has discussed cryptocurrencies in interviews and writings, noting their potential to enhance financial inclusion if stabilised-echoing stablecoins’ design to combine crypto’s efficiency with fiat-like reliability. Shiller’s CAPE (Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings) ratio exemplifies pegging metrics to long-term fundamentals, a concept mirrored in stablecoin reserves. While not a crypto native, his behavioural insights explain depegging risks from herd mentality, making him the foremost theorist for stablecoin strategy in volatile markets.
References
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stablecoin
2. https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/stablecoin
3. https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/what-is-a-stablecoin
5. https://klrd.gov/2024/11/15/stablecoin-overview/
7. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/what-are-stablecoins-and-how-do-they-work
8. https://bvnk.com/blog/stablecoins-vs-bitcoin
9. https://business.cornell.edu/article/2025/08/stablecoins/
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