risk, opportunity and shorttermism

When you’re the CEO of a large corporate, uncertainty can kill your business: it’s risk on one side, it’s opportunity on the other and for many organisations, it’s both. If you’re a large company, how do you figure out whether your core business is going to hit a wall and die, and how quickly do you need to build something else in its place? An entrepreneurial skill set becomes really helpful. It doesn’t help figure out what to do when every call you get is from institutional investors about dividends this month. It is very difficult for large companies to evaluate what they’re going to do with their core in a way that doesn’t destroy massive amounts of shareholder value.