The Balance of Risk:
When to Go & When to Hold Back
by Marcus Memedovich,
Director of Publications
/06 064
When you boil it down to its very basics, a business is really just a collection of decisions spread out over a long period of time, compounding into a single organization. Of course, there are other elements to it— products, services, stocks, boards of directors— but it all comes down to the choices made. The decision to host an IPO. The decision to launch a new product. The decision to start a business in the first place.
Of course, on the flip side, there are the decisions that we have never heard about— the decision to not do something, because it was deemed too risky or infeasible. While this can often protect you from disastrous choices leading to financial difficulty or even bankruptcy, it can have the long term effect of getting you nowhere. Markets are always evolving, and no company ever stayed on top by sitting on their hands and refusing to take risks.
Therefore, business decisions are all about balancing risks with rewards and deciding when to go forward or when to wait. This is more of an art than it is a science, and relies on a healthy mix of advanced statistics and intuition built through years of experience. To help gain some insight into the decision making process, we’ll look at two famous gaffs— one where a company went forward with a bad plan, and one where a company sat around and waited for the market to force them into obscurity.