For some background--recently I've been reading up on the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an interesting thinker set aside from a rather uninspiring lot of financial prognosticators and apologists.  His most recent work, The Black Swan, takes its title from that occurrence for which we can neither prepare nor accomodate: the Black Swan among a gaggle of white.

And so I'll borrow Taleb's term for this unexpected event of surpassing magnitude and color it differently: the Purple Swan is the Black Swan we handle in a completely expected, unimaginative, and prosaic fashion by talking it to death.  The grisly demise of Michael Jackson seems to me the best, most recent example of this death of a thousand cuts--you'll pardon the pun, please.

The corporate world finds its corollary to Purple Swan behavior in the endless skein of meetings that inevitably follow a dramatic success or calamity.  I well remember the heady days of the dot-com boom in Manhattan; each morning seemed to bring three or four reports from various boroughs--'Company X just fired half of its support staff'; 'Company Y's creditors are at the door with baseball bats'; 'Company Z did so well this last quarter that the whole office went to Bermuda for the rest of the month.'  And so on and so forth.  An endless dialogue that would catalyze itself into the dreaded 'Death By Meeting.'

Our house painters are asked to resist the (very human) impulse to color a black swan purple; when encountering something theretofore unencountered onsite, our men and women consistently take a step back, ask questions if necessary, and make a considered move rather than tread the (very human) path of least resistance: a quick nod of the head and the rush to an illusory 'oh yeah, yeah, I know what this is and we'll take care of it' while lulling the customer into somnolence with a tedious, drawn out explication.  Sometimes, things happen.  We're proud to have a staff of men and women who are not too proud to seek each other's counsel when the Black Swan beckons.