Adventure Capitalist

Do you hang out with, listen to, read the work of and/or take advice from mostly likeminded people? I’m sorry to say, but you are breeding a dangerous monoculture around yourself, and you’re taking on a big risk of exposing yourself to dangers that will take you completely by surprise.
Just as monocultures in agriculture and genetics lead to increased risk of famine and lower natural resistance to new diseases, so do social monocultures increase the risk of becoming wedded to defunct ideas or blind to radical change until it’s too late.

Monocultures & Likeminded People Sowed the Seeds of Financial Disaster
I have lived in London for a long time, and with finance in general and investment banking and hedge funds in particular making up an outsized part of the economy, it is easy to make some key observations:
Investment banks are a testosteron driven environment, where “doing the deal” is more important than doing the RIGHT deal, and perhaps most dangerously where numerate degrees and backgrounds dominate the landscape entirely. Investment banks are are filled with people who are not only likeminded, but are also snobby about being likeminded and only consider recruiting those who are likeminded, or can be moulded to become similar enough. 

What is the result of a culture where everyone thinks alike, where moving from deal to deal is more important than doing the right deals? Where it is an article of faith that complicated Excel-spreadsheets can model absolute truth, even if fundamental base assumptions are made-up/wrong, causing great distortion in every succeeding number? Where human behaviour and psychology is completely disregarded, seen as heresy and sacrificed at the altar of calculus and quantitative analysis?
The consequences can be nothing but disastrous, as we have recently seen and surely will again.

Business & Ideology Make For Terrible Bedfellows
I make no secret of the fact that I lean towards voluntaryism, non-aggression and liberty when it comes to politics. Inevitably this will colour my view of the world despite my best attempts to detach ideology from my perception of it, I am only human after all.
However, I do my best to detach my ideological views from perception as much as I can where I am aware of my bias: to me, ideology is a philosophical standpoint and a moral compass in personal matters. It is not a religious belief in ideology being able to prescribe a solution for every ill or holding the ultimate truth.
Mixing your ideological views with your perception of reality and truth is a dangerous thing, it has cost much grief and human suffering throughout history and on a much smaller scale, there are many risks with mixing ideology and business, such as:

• Ideology driving you to make bad choices and investment decisions.
• Money made on ideological standpoints cementing ideas and creating a rigid mindset, even after ideas having been disproven.

Ideology Drives Poor Decisions
Effectively, The two points mentioned above are two sides of the same coin seen from slightly different perspectives.
Let us use the gold market as an example of the first point, ideology driving bad investment decisions. Making a gross generalisation, opinions on gold are divided into two camps. The first camp consists largely of proponents of free markets who tend to be in favour of a monetary gold standard and who more often than not are perma-bulls on gold (also called “gold bugs”). The second camp tends to be Keynesians, and economic statists, who see gold as little more than a “barbarous relic” best passed to scrap heap of history.
Given the highly ideological nature of the divide, it is exceedingly difficult to find any sort of balanced investment analysis on the case for- or against gold, as most of the arguments are based on political ideology rather than matters of fact!
It should be noted that in the last decade, the gold bulls have been right, but then again they where wrong for the better part of twenty years while the perma-bears where right throughout most of the 80’ies and 90’ies.
At this point it is worth pointing out the old adage that even a broken watch is correct at least twice a day. Ideology is simply a very poor predictor of the future or judge of causality.

A Vested Interest Creates an Inflexible Mind
As for the second point, money gained from ideology tends to create or cement a rigid and inflexible mind - to take a less political subject, consider all the quality and efficiency standards/ideologies that have passed through the services sector of the economy in the last few decades. We have seen various ISO standards, Six Sigma, CMMI, RUP to mention just a few, all of these have fallen to the wayside, as have the business built around them, as the underpinning ideas have been disproven, debunked or proven to not be particularly applicable outside of their initial area of use.
Building a business based on an ideology is doomed to fail sooner or later because it puts the blinkers on the people inside the business. It makes them resistant to new ideas and streams of thought - they put their future behind a given ideology, and often they will stick with it until the very end, because of their financial and emotional investment in it. They only see what they want to see, what confirms their world view, because it has been solidified and cemented due to their personal investment and interest in it.

Whenever I start to hear public opinion or just the people around me holding opinions and views that sound too much alike, too much like regurgitations of the same set of ideas, I sit up, take notice and try to put my critical and contrarian hat on. It pays to be a contrarian and question the views of the people around you, even those who think just like you. 
When a large herd all run in the same direction at speed, you should get suspicious and consider if there might be a slaughter house somewhere up the road.