Brittle sounds like fragile. This article reminds me of Nassim Taleb's amazing book, Antifragile.
Fragile organizations and systems break from randomness.
Robust ones are able to resist and stay strong.
But Antifragile ones actually benefit from randomness and volatility.
I highly recommend the book -- it's highly relevant to startup companies who, rather than shooting for the moon, should protect their downside (at first) and place small bets on numerous 10x activities.
I would like to ask you what you found so compelling about Antifragile. When I read the book, I found it simply repeated the claim using various examples that were specific to Taleb's life: [My career as an author is antifragile because I could beat up an economist and I would gain notoriety and increase sales.]
However, I was unable to gain any insight into how that applied to typical situations, e.g. investing, career choices, romantic relationships, home purchasing. That is, beyond "do these things in an antifragile way, not a fragile way."
He also follows these things up with canned strategies to make your life antifragile, without making any attempt to demonstrate how or why these strategies are actually so.
Example: he does not recommend the standard investment strategy of purchasing stock funds and bond funds at a ratio that approximates your tolerance for risk. This is, for some reason, fragile. He recommends putting most of your money into the safest investments available on the market, with the rest of your money going into the riskiest moonshots you can find. This is, for some reason, antifragile. "Unimportant" questions like why and how these strategies are classified as fragile/antifragile and what kinds of investments he considers appropriately safe are left as an exercise to the reader.
On the flip side, I can’t recommend against reading the book enough. Your summary is pretty much enough to get the point across, minus endless pages of self-aggrandizement and throwing around preemptive ad hominem attacks toward any group he thinks might disagree with him.
I genuinely can’t understand how anyone could have made it through that book.
I dropped the Black Swan after only a few pages as Taleb managed, within those few pages, to simultaneously mock someone for using a personal anecdote to justify a position only to repeatedly use personal anecdotes over the next few pages to justify his position.
Fragile organizations and systems break from randomness. Robust ones are able to resist and stay strong. But Antifragile ones actually benefit from randomness and volatility.
I highly recommend the book -- it's highly relevant to startup companies who, rather than shooting for the moon, should protect their downside (at first) and place small bets on numerous 10x activities.