Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Death and Taxes - failure in business and better decision-making

The inevitability of each is legend. However, so is failure in most business situations. Most new products fail. They need not in many cases. It is often clear to observers that the product is going to fail, but "the emperor has no clothes" syndrome takes over and no one says anything. Thus everyone watches in silence as the product rushes to inevitable failure and most effort goes into working out how to avoid blame. The same applies to acquisitions, new technologies. Yet as H.G. Wells said, "all progress is due to unreasonable men." People keep taking risks even if very foolish. Sadly, they do not use the simple tools which can reduce risk.

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