If you were a kid growing up in the 80’s it was pretty hard to have not seen and been wowed by at least one of the original Indiana Jones movies. As a hero, the titular Indiana had the whole package – brains, courage, machismo and rugged good looks (which were eerily similar to those of another lead in a Lucasfilm series from the same time).
In our house, Raiders of the Lost Ark was on a continual VHS loop on Saturday mornings from the late 80’s to the early 90’s. Indy’s adventures left me with a profoundly warped perception of what an archeologist actually did, but instilled in me a lifelong passion for history and the promise that historical study brings – the ability to better understand the present through knowledge of the past.
For me, the real value of risk management in business has much in common with the study of history. Risk management allows us to look to the failures, both big and small, of other businesses throughout history, understand the hows and whys of their failures, and then apply those learnings to our own ventures.
Whilst there is no way of ever fully avoiding the risks that are an intrinsic part of entrepreneurial endeavours, the insights we can glean from at least the last century of business history can help any entrepreneur avoid a plethora of potential mistakes.
In the New Year I will be kicking off a series of posts that will focus on specific case studies of failures in real businesses. In this series we will examine the underlying and avoidable causes of these failures and I will show you the practical steps you can take to apply these learnings to your own business and stay on the path to success in 2015.
To ensure you don’t miss out on this series along with the rest of the great content I’ll be posting, follow this link to subscribe to theriskguy today (it takes less than 1 minute and as always I promise no spam – just useful and on topic articles straight to your inbox).
0 comments:
Post a Comment