See our new column in Forbes:
As we entered August, a time of family vacations and corporate retreats, a CEO friend, who is a director of several companies, made a darkly humorous observation. “I’m impressed,” he said. “At our upcoming retreat, the CEO is dedicating an entire day to talk about . . . the business.”
This was a break from the new normal, where management is consumed with compliance, legality, accounting, risk mitigation, and political prognostication and manipulation. Carving time out of a business retreat to talk strategy, execution, product, and sales was a welcome novelty. It also revealed a chief challenge of our times – the obsession with and aversion to risk.
Update: Steve Lohr, the excellent New York Times technology reporter, offers his own take on risk-taking through the lens of Steve Jobs. Lohr and I picked the same great quote from Jobs’ Stanford commencement address.
