I’m so inspired by Bandit’s piece on failure that I’m writing a comment as a post!
The mainstream corporate allergy to risk and failure reminds me of the Beavis and Butthead episode when they go camping, and Butthead has to take a shit in the woods. He wipes his butt with poison ivy and the whole camping thing goes from bad to worse. His disconnect from nature (see BigCo) leads him to a decision that only makes his problems bigger.
This is what happens in large firms. Fear of taking risks creates ’scientific metrics’ that discount anything that is not proven according to pre-configured metrics. If you try something new and it goes wrong, this thinking goes, you end up wiping your ass with poison ivy. Most people will want to avoid doing this twice.
Enter Risk Management
Rather than looking out broadly at larger social, economic, and cultural trends- such as the rapid take-up of mobile telephony and mobile gaming in Asia and the inevitability of changes in the energy sector- for signposts to craft strategy, money farmers create clever instruments (SIVS, CDOs, MBSs) to grow money out of money, and then call it Risk Management!
This is only risky for the poor saps left holding the mortgages for which they didn’t legitimately qualify in the first place. Getting Moody’s to grant a AAA rating to a recently fabricated ’securitization’ passes as risk management. Voila! Kill a couple of chickens, throw some salt over your shoulder, and that big-ass pool of (other people’s) money is magically securitized.
Until…It gets un-securitized. By reality.
In lieu of an honest acceptance of the reality and, indeed, necessity of failure (thanks Bandit!) that might lead to sustainable innovation that drives organic growth, what we get instead is risk management.
Risk management is a lame-ass excuse provided by people so cut off from the primal mainstream that, in their hatred of nature, they wipe their ass with poison ivy. Once.
The Butcher
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