Don't Trust the Naked Eye to Judge This Recovery
The scale and speed are so unprecedented that it’s little wonder so many investors have been caught by surprise already. Caution is wise.
Investors may need help in viewing this off-the-charts rebound.
Photographer: FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images
One of my favorite cases from business school was about a company called Optical Distortion Inc. Many of you will remember it. It concerned a plan to sell contact lenses for chickens. The big idea was that once chickens had special lenses in their eyes to distort their vision, they became less aggressive and less likely to attack each other. This made them much more valuable for poultry farmers, and offered an alternative to their previous process for dealing with the chickens’ pecking order, a horrific-sounding process called “debeaking.” The whole notion grew even harder to deal with on discovering that the plan was to give the chickens red lenses, so that everything would be the color of blood. That way, they wouldn’t be attracted to the sight of blood on other chickens.
Looking around the internet, I discover that Optical Distortion was indeed one of the most popular Harvard Business School cases of all time. I also confirmed that the idea never caught on. Putting a contact lens into a chicken is — as most of us non-poultry farmers would expect — quite a lot more trouble than it’s worth, and often quite cruel. Red light bulbs to bathe them in red light can have similar effect.