I suggest that the book, in fact, suffers a subtle blind spot like that of the people who made-off (sorry, couldn’t resist) with Other People’s Money.

It wasn’t  poor abilities to make decisions. Those people were in fact too effective in making decisions, and ingenious with their execution. Part of that scene was saying we only needed actuarial risk hedging, in place of regulation.   Did we step back, and see the larger “frame” – the context?

The lessons learned should include the structure, not just content.  We so fall in love with our technology, forgetting the lessons like those we should have learned in 1987.  Only this time, the afterquakes are global – the other side to that wonderful newly minted coin, globalization.  Perrow has written about system accidents.  In a later blog, I will write about Stanford’s excellent model for strategic execution.

Take our increasing use of quants and analytics.   What about those soft issues that we cannot quantify nor fit into a spreadsheet cell?  They tend to clutter our tidy logical constructs, don’t they?

Zoom out. See the goal in its context of competing goals and the larger community of stakeholders. But it’s a catch-22: to have that vantage view, one must want to rise to the next level beyond goals: Values. Maybe even confess to some morality?  There is a subtle blindspot to not being able to use those words, and instead reduce them to decision-process mechanics.

Context.  Values lead to clarity, and clarity might lead to accountability – if we wanted to.