Customer Reviews

The Timid Corporation: Why Business is Terrified of Taking Risk

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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This book offers a passionate and stupendously irreverent slap in the face to virtually every management orthodoxy and business shibboleth. Nothing escapes the scathing criticism of this corporate Jeremiad. Managing for shareholder value? Woe to you, sinner! Think the brand is important? Out with you, infidel! There's plenty to find fault with in author Benjamin Hurt's presentation of his case. He's vengefully biased, and never lets a silly fixation like "balance" get in the way of a good zinger. He's set himself to dig holes in the dikes that hold the wild waters of skepticism at bay. This book will make you mad, make you protest, may even make you throw it against the wall in disgust. But any book that makes you react that way has something going for it. At least, it's a bracingly different perspective from anything else you'll read about management, marketing or finance. With that caveat about balance firmly in mind,
We suggest reading this decidedly eccentric, provocative original, if you dare to take the risk.

A contrarian view of risk management that has overtones of 'the emperor has no clothes'. The author argues that business has become obsessed with risk and self-regulates to the point that genuine (and risky) innovation is stifled. He offers a lot of evidence that undue concern with risk, coupled with a desire (largely for safety) to 'offer customers what they want' and 'build customer loyalty' actually works against the best interest of customers and the business.

While it is clear that the author is against undue caution, he believes that this is affecting most business and makes a good case for his arguments, it is less clear what he is for. There is a risk (!) that the book will simply be used by those who are interested in preventing government regulation and ridiculing self-regulation. It is usefully provocative but ignores or ridicules some real risks that require careful management. The author's cavalier dismissal of environmental concerns is a good example of this.

Hunt could have easily written a 5 star book by basing its major conclusions,the current dearth of both long run investment and innovation by most major corporations,on a foundation composed of the theoretical work of D.Ellsberg,J.M.Keynes, B.Mandelbrot ,and the mathematical modeling of Dixit and Pindyck's"real options"approach(see their 1993 book "Investment under Uncertainty") as a replacement for the badly flawed neoclassical EVA(economic value added) approach that essentially degenerates into a purely short run,short sighted,pennywise,poundfoolish labor cost cutting(a la "chainsaw"Al Dunlop)policy that ignores revenue generation through innovation in new products,services,technologies,industrial processes and/or improvements in current products,etc.The crucial distinction that Hunt tries to make between risk and REAL risk[ risk(mild risk) versus uncertainty , ambiguity,or wild risk] was made by Keynes in his A Treatise on Probability(1921)and in Chapter 12 of his 1936 General Theory,by Ellsberg in a 1961 Quarterly Journal of Economics article and his (2001) book,Risk,Ambiguity and Decision,and by Mandelbrot in a series of books and articles written since 1955[see his (2004)The (Mis)Behavior of Markets,with Hudson].Hunt is certaintly correct that the EVA rule"...is a frenzied attempt to formalize things that cannot easily be formalized..."(Hunt,p.116).Hunt needs to integrate the work of the thinkers pointed out in this review into the corpus of his book in a revised edition,probably an extended appendix.