Nature of Investing: Resilient Investment Strategies Through Biomimicry 1st Edition

Whoa, not the investment book I was expecting. This is a must read, game changer. Here's how I'd sum it up:Tired of flat screen, algorithm-driven, mechanized financial markets that feel increasingly disconnected from daily life?Wouldn't it be nice if instead the world of finance were: effective, resilient, elegantly simple & naturally optimized?By connecting real-world finance with a deeply rooted, scientifically valid framework (biomimicry) Katherine Collins shows us how investing can be returned to its core purpose of mutual exchange and mutual purpose.If this sounds mind-blowing, it is. Collins' underlying point is that its time for us to refocus investing on its essential, connected form - relational not transactional, regenerative not extractive, optimized, not maximized, resilient not rigid.As Collins notes - we are all investors. Whether wearing our hats at citizens, consumers, and/or business people... with each decision about how we spend our time, energy, and money, we are investing.Alas, our current global financial system is in need of a serious course correct. By asking "WWND" (What Would Nature Do?) Collins presents a compelling, innovative, and highly actionable vision of a new investment path, one which emulates nature's genius. Highly recommend this delightfully readable book.

A very thoughtful perspective that will help me think and act more intentionally when investing. The key points being that we need to understand our original reason for investing and the implications of our investment actions.Ms. Collins takes what is often viewed as an individual action (investing) and makes it clear that it is really a systematic action that has broad ramifications. She also describes many if the flaws in our current investment system in an easily understood manner. Well worth the read.

With The Nature of Investing, Katherine Collins has delivered a useful and welcome introduction to thinking about the problem of investing and economics in terms of Nature’s elegant methods.Using basic principles and guides Collins compares and contrast where things go wrong and what to look for when they are right. Her approach frames companies, products and solutions as trade offs between six pairs of solution metrics: The efficient vs. effective, the synthetic vs. simple, maximized vs. optimized, disconnected vs. reconnected, mechanical vs. mindful and finally the static vs. the dynamic. By looking at economic and investment problems from these mechanistic versus natural solution types; Collins offers simple but profound ways of probing the sustainability and resilience of companies and economies likely outcomes.She questions GDP growth as an absolute good, correctly identifying faults in GDP which includes growth in prisons, guns and arms but doesn’t measure important qualities, such as the strength of our family ties, well being and our relationships with each other and our future legacy.Her nature based approach using basic questions allows her to explore worthy critiques of pointless trading, math models gone wild in finance, and other examples of complex economic activity adding broad economic risk with narrowly distributed minimal returns. Finance specialists innovatively chasing their own tails on such scale rarely end well.A critique of this book is its length. More could have been shared leaving the reader wishing for an even deeper investigation into such an interesting theme and Collins perspective on it. This reader looks forward to following Collin’s work for some time.

Katherine Collins' book on the Nature of Investing takes us on a journey back to our own instincts about why we invest and exchange resources in the first place -- for the sake of mutual exchange, shared benefit, and systemic health. As an "armchair investor" daunted by financial jargon, this book gave me a new level of intelligence which I will apply to fiscal decisions, of course, but also to my personal and professional choices as well. Thank you, Collins, for welcoming us home to a world where investing reassumes its real, tangible, vulnerable, truly powerful form.

Katherine's unique style and brilliance shines through in the easy to understand prose in The Nature of Investing. Katherine manages to take 2 very complex worlds - that of investing and that of nature - and distill both into simple forms that in some ways make you long for the old days when life and investing were so much simpler, but then to also come away from reading the book with a new found resolve to add back that simplicity in your own life.This is a must read for those of us who have had the privilege of working with Katherine.

I'm an investor again! I lost interest in investing, what was stock exchange relating business for me, a long time ago. It was too technical, too fast, too artificial and just too phony. But after reading Katherines book I'm so hopefull and motivated to invest again. To invest in real products, real ideas and real innovations. If I care about the stock excahnge again, I dont know. But it doesn't matter to me anymore because the Nature of Investing showed me the way to invest from the heart into things I believe in.And the best thing is that the book is really a joy to read and made me feel really good.Thank you Katherine!

I really wanted to love this book because Manisha Thakor had sung such high praises -- that I bought it new! Without even checking at the library! This was the ultimate impulse purchase based on someone else's reviews.The concept is certainly important: that crowd systems have complexity. But it just wasn't as life changing as "The Soul of Money" and it did not revolutionize my attitudes in a paradigm shift.