As a marketing professional, the favorite part of my job is the time I spend with customers. This past week I was asked to host a senior government delegation in our Executive Briefing Center. Since the 45 minute slot was supposed to encourage conversation, I brought a single slide as a visual aid. Imagine my…
Archive | August, 2009
Smooth-sailing Fallacy
In a McKinsey Quarterly article entitled “Management lessons from the financial crisis,” UCLA business professor Richard Rumelt coins the term smooth-sailing fallacy: This smooth-sailing fallacy arises when we mistake a measure for reality. Competent management always looks deeper than the numbers, deeper than the current measures. Incompetent management just focuses on the metrics, on the body…
Enterprise Risk Oversight
A new report entitled the Current State of Enterprise Risk Oversight (alternately, here) has been published by several faculty members from the Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) Initiative at North Carolina State University. For me, the conclusions are alarming, but perhaps not surprising: Despite the growing pressures for more effective risk oversight that are emerging from the…