In The Risk Paradox on May 1, 2010 by Jim McCormick Tagged: Business Lessons from the Edge, intelligent risk-taking, management excellence, Management Excellence Awards
I recently wrote about discipline being a vital element in exploiting intelligent risk-taking. More broadly, risk has to be managed well to get the results it can provide.
Managing well involves more than just managing risk, but doing so is a critical part of management success. The athlete/executives in my recent book Business Lessons from the Edge (McGraw-Hill) offer some powerful insights into managing excellence. In large part, they revolve around acknowledging and respecting the importance of quality management.
It’s refreshing to see excellence in the art and science of managing recognized. The Australian Institute of Management is in its 20th year of awarding Management Excellence Awards.
The awards are presented annually in a variety of categories. Information on the awards is available at www.managementawards.com.au.
What a great idea. Managing well is a tremendous challenge that requires commitment, passion, resilience and insight. It is great to see successful managers receive the recognition they deserve.
In The Risk Paradox on March 25, 2010 by Jim McCormick Tagged: Business Lessons from the Edge, intelligent risk-taking, risking poorly, risking well, Western Industrial Nevada
Tomorrow I will be presenting to Western Industrial Nevada here in Reno. WIN is a organization that draws the leadership of the business community in this area to its monthly meetings. The presentation will draw from my most recent book Business Lessons from the Edge.
Sometimes we are well served to express our thoughts briefly. It forces us to boil our ideas down to very few words.
Over the years, people have asked me for the brief version of how I recommend they address risk. The answer is among the lessons I will be presenting tomorrow to WIN: risk is like fire. Simple but hopefully clear.
As with fire, we have a choice of how we approach risk. If we forgo using fire, we will have a cold home, cold showers and many cold meals. If we use fire effectively, it makes our lives much better and more comfortable. And if we use fire poorly, we can get burned – literally.
All is the same for risk. If we just try to avoid it, we pay an onerous price. Utilized well, the rewards can be great. Used poorly, risk can extract a high toll.
Risk is like fire.
In The Risk Paradox on March 9, 2010 by Jim McCormick Tagged: Business Lessons from the Edge, Contingency Thinking, human resources, intelligent risk-taking, The Power of Risk
While preparing for a webinar for human resources professionals I’ll be delivering later today, at the request of the client I was focused on ways to avoid worst-case HR scenarios.
The first method I’ll be offering for avoiding major problems are an awareness of the five primary reasons for bad outcomes as drawn from the interviews with forty athlete/executives when we were writing Business Lessons from the Edge.
The second method is a tool called Contingency Thinking, which is also from Business Lessons from the Edge. Contingency Thinking centers on thinking through in advance how you will handle a difficult situation, should it occur. You can readily see how this would be a popular strategy for successful business people who are also accomplished extreme athletes.
The third device is something that is familiar to anyone who has been following this blog, Intelligent Risk-Taking, which is from my book The Power of Risk. Intelligent Risk-Taking involves taking six specific steps that have the effect of increasing the chances of a desirable outcome and decrease the chances of an undesirable outcome for any risk or initiative.
The interesting commonality that surfaced while preparing for the webinar is that both Contingency Thinking and Intelligent Risk-Taking require discipline to be effective – the discipline to apply them faithfully.
This almost falls into the category of counter-intuitive. The common perception is that talented risk-takers are impulsive. The opposite is true. Talented risk-takers are actually methodical and disciplined.
