Spyros Makridakis

Spyros Makridakis

Although fond of quoting Aristotle, Spyros is a thoroughly modern Greek. In fact he represented his country as a member of its sailing team in the 1960 Olympics, before setting sail for New York University, where he obtained his PhD in 1969. Since then, Spyros has held teaching and research positions at several European and American institutions: research fellow with IIM Berlin; ICAME fellow at Stanford University; visiting scholar at MIT and Harvard; and Professor at INSEAD.

He is now Professor Emeritus at INSEAD, the school that he first joined back in 1970. Over his years there, he has won awards both for his teaching and for his research, which includes 20 books and more than 120 articles and book chapters. He has also edited leading academic journals in his field of statistics.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Spyros has provided many organizations with consultancy and advice. He has also served on the boards of several companies, sometimes as Chairman.

Throughout his long and distinguished career, Spyros has struggled to answer one question that executives kept asking: “If you’re telling me that nothing is predictable, why do I need a forecasting expert like you?” He still struggles to answer it, but these days at least many people agree with him that there are serious limits to our predictability and that uncertainty is much higher than we humans are willing to accept. At the moment, he’s particularly fond of pointing out that nobody predicted the subprime crisis and that nobody can be sure what will fix the problem, even if it has already cost several trillion dollars of taxpayers' money.

Spyros’s current interests, in addition to what we can do if we cannot accurately predict, center less on his old statistical stamping grounds and more on how new technologies affect business and society. His Emeritus position also enables him to spend more time with his wife and two young sons. They, however, would claim that his main interest is still sailing – an activity that represents the ultimate paradox of control. No one can control the magnitude or direction of the wind, but if you accept the weather conditions that luck sends, you can often harness it to go exactly where you want at higher speeds than your competitors.