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| Joanna Makomaski | |||||||||
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Columnist
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2012-06-01 Risk Confessions I will never forget this story. It deeply inspired me early in my career. As a young natural gas engineer, I was charged with the installation of microturbines. My job then was to produce microturbine specifications, get the turbines manufactured and have them installed. Each turbine had a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars. MORE 2012-05-01 How Big Your Risk Appetite? You are walking toward your car through a poorly lit parking lot late at night. Just one other car is in the lot. You hear a noise behind you. You look back, see nothing and continue at a slightly faster pace. You hear another noise behind you, again no one, but you pick up your pace nonetheless. MORE 2012-04-13 Get What You Pay For We have all heard the expressions: "You get what you pay for," "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys," and "Nothing in life is free." They all speak to how money drives us. MORE 2012-03-01 Assessing a Maturity Model It appears that 16 is the magic number. All around the world it is the average age where we are perceived to have "a coming of age." It is believed that at 16, we reach a spiritual maturity and are ready to embrace our responsibilities and accountabilities within society. MORE 2012-02-21 Is Independence Impossible? Who among us enjoys giving another person bad news? Who among us has the saint-like ability to remain fair-minded with someone who may have treated us poorly in the past? Who among us can resist altering our behavior or decisions if we knew we would be better compensated if we did? MORE 2011-12-01 Just Enough Information A Boeing 767 airliner carrying 231 passengers from Newark, N.J., made an emergency landing on its belly at the Warsaw, Poland, airport in November after an unprecedented landing gear failure. MORE 2011-11-01 Tests Could Stress Carriers Recently, I questioned the origin of the word bankruptcy. It was the "bank" portion of the word that triggered my curiosity. I learned that the word is derived from the Latin bancus, meaning bench, and ruptus, meaning broken. Centuries ago, the first bankers set up shop on bench-like tables in open air markets. When they failed their customers or if their banks were found to be unsound in any way, their table was symbolically broken and the insolvent banker was cast off. The bank was broken. MORE 2011-10-15 Focus on the Known Risks "There are 'known knowns.' There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know." --Donald Rumsfeld, former United States Secretary of Defense, June 6, 2002 MORE 2011-10-01 Merits of a Risk Committee In the wake of corporate scandals, and financial crises Part I and now Part II, it is no surprise that we are seeing corporations increase their focus on risks that threaten their long-term health and wealth. It is also no surprise that we are seeing re-examinations of what really constitutes a board's fiduciary obligation. We have been reassessing what should be a board's overall responsibility and how a board should be structured to best achieve its objectives. MORE 2011-09-15 Make the Right Debt Your Friend The warning alarms sounded loudly in Washington. We watched the exhausting political posturing for two torturous weeks. In the end, we saw the U.S. debt limit raised. We did not default on our obligations. We still paid our bills. Soon after, we saw rating agencies showing new muscle and teeth with the first ever AAA downgrade in the U.S. suggesting a slightly higher risk of debt repayment. We saw market behavior that took us on a nauseating rollercoaster ride. And now we sit confused and frustrated as to what this all really means. MORE 2011-09-01 Judging Corporate Policies Is there such a thing as a stupid policy? We have all been there, listening to customer service representatives citing frustrating corporate policies that do not address our consumer concerns or, ironically, do not solve any of their concerns either. MORE 2011-08-23 Tweet Smartly and Be Wary I remember when I first started to hear the term tweet. It was early 2008 during the presidential race. I asked myself what in heaven's name is this Twitter everyone is talking about? MORE
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