If you knew in 1998 what you know now, what would your company have done differently? No doubt the answers run from limiting debt financing, to paying a lot more attention to cash generation, to much more focus on bottom- rather than top-line results. But no one would say, "I wouldn't change a thing." The early Greeks and Romans didn't worry about uncertainty. Though they had the mathematical skills to have conceived and developed ways of analyzing probabilities, it didn't occur to them to try. The very idea of uncertainty would have been foreign. They believed that everything was predestined. It wasn't until the Middle Ages that the idea of probability arose and rigorous attempts at analysis occurred. Within a couple of centuries the pendulum had swung so far that many believed every system could be precisely analyzed in probability terms. Humanity had thus developed the concept of "uncertainty," and began applying its skills to sorting the odds.