Two tankers were trapped in heavy seas. One carried a load of red paint; the other carried purple.
Despite the heroic efforts of their captains, the ships drifted closer and closer together, until finally, they crashed.
The sailors were marooned.
I have, sad to say, a fondness for plays on words. It’s a horror for friends and family, and might account for why I have so few of either.
Edward Tufte has a different use for the word punning. He uses it to describe the confusion caused when one word has two separate meanings, and apparently considers it reprehensible. Of course, by adding this definition to an existing word, he has created an opportunity for more punning (his version) to happen, but it’s a small sin.
Reader Jim Ehrlich brought this to my attention in the context of last week’s column on risk mitigation (“The value of a little failure here and there,” KJR, 7/16/2007). His point: “Risk” is susceptible to punning, in that it encompasses two very different concepts — voluntary risks and inflicted risks. Business decision-makers conflate them at their peril.
Risk mitigation is a response to inflicted risks. Businesses don’t choose to place themselves in harm’s way when it comes to (for example) malware, system intrusions, embezzlement, or, for that matter, floods, fires, tornadoes or hurricanes.
With inflicted risks, the choice businesses have to make is how and how much to mitigate them. You install antivirus software and firewalls, implement process controls, develop and test business continuity plans, and buy insurance. You live with the residual risk, recognizing that no risk mitigation program is perfect.
Voluntary risks are a wholly different matter. The easiest way to make sense of them is to recognize that every decision a business makes is an investment decision. This is by definition: Decisions commit or deny time, staff and money. Everything else is just talking about it.
When you make an investment decision, part of your decision is how much risk you’re willing to take.
Some people are comfortable investing in junk bonds and hedge funds. They figure that for the increased risk of the investment, they get an opportunity for a higher payoff.
Once they make the decision to invest they don’t spend time and energy trying to mitigate the risk. What would be the point? Or, for that matter, the technique?
I know of no insurance company that will sell you a bad-investment policy, except maybe Lloyds of London, which will theoretically insure anything at all.
Were someone willing to write you a policy, though, it wouldn’t help. The underwriters would figure the risk and charge you a premium big enough to cover the spread. You’d come out about the same as you would if you’d invested in something safer, minus the insurance company’s profit on the policy.
So smart businesses (or, more accurately, businesses with smart decision-makers) do what smart investors do. They take risk into account during the due diligence they perform on each decision, and handle the remainder by choosing the rest of their “investment portfolio” (the sum of all decisions with impending business consequences) to provide a comfortable balance.
You’ll often read that businesses make decisions, then do what they can to minimize the risk. This isn’t strictly speaking true. In most cases, “minimize the risk” means becoming very skillful.
The failure rate for mergers and acquisitions, to take an example, is around 70%. The reason it’s so big is because most companies that engage in mergers and acquisitions are amateurish at execution. Among companies that are good at mergers and acquisitions, the failure rate is very low.
We’d be done except for one annoying, nagging point: Voluntary risks and inflicted risks aren’t entirely separate subjects. They overlap.
For example: A retailer might choose to locate a store in the inner city instead of a shopping mall. Built into that decision is an increased risk of vandalism.
Does that make the vandalism a voluntary risk? Yes — the retailer chose the location consciously, knowing the crime statistics for the neighborhood. Does that mean vandalism isn’t an inflicted risk? Of course not. In the end, vandalism is a choice made by the vandal, not the retailer.
The risk of vandalism is both chosen and inflicted.
So, with apologies to Dr. Tufte, punning isn’t always an intellectual sin. That’s because Earth isn’t so conceptually sterile that we can avoid punning entirely.
Especially when someone hands us a good straight line.