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As McKelvey and Andriani point out, companies like Google and Microsoft have achieved enormous concentration of economic value creation that defies the averages of the Gaussian world. These extreme events have an interesting property – they emerge first in the “fat tail”, on the edge of conventional business activity, driven by a different view of business opportunity, and then gather momentum until they eventually break into the head of the distribution and change the game for everyone else. The challenge for business managers is to sort out the signal from the noise in the fat tail and spot early on the emergent extreme events that could reshape the business landscape. The Gaussian focus on averages obscures these events, treating them as meaningless “outliers” until it is too late.
