Recently in the New York Times, the adventurer David Roberts wrote a wonderful piece describing how mountaineering has changed. In the old days, he said, you were truly ‘out there’: your life depended on your ingenuity and your stamina. If you made bad calls, you were gone. Help was not at hand. By contrast, today explorers and climbers, thanks to GBS, satellite phones and helicopters, expect to be rescued - even though some rescues end up costing more lives than they save. The implication of his story was that mountaineering had become soft and selfish with the expectation that help at any cost would always be available.
Mountains and Managers
You could say the same of business. Big banks, like Citi and Bear Stearns, could take stupid risks because they expected to be, and were, bailed out - even though their rescue cost - and is still costing - everyone else dearly. Similarly executives leading major corporations like Merrill Lynch may not know how much risk they’re incurring, they may have little or no idea how to get themselves and their teams out of the mess they’ve made, but they walk away, enriched at the expense of others.
To read the full, original article click on this link: How Successful Leaders View Risk | BNET
Author:Margaret Heffernan
