Friday, July 15, 2011

Feelings

by Rick Nason, PhD, CFA

Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.

www.RSDsolutions.com

info@RSDsolutions.com

 

If you opened this blog thinking it was going to be about the old 70’s (1974) song by the same name then you are mistaken.  I thought that song sucked – even when it was parodied.   Instead I want to tell you a short story about when I was a graduate student.  I spent a summer writing business school cases for Dr. Shaw – who was an awesome Finance Professor.  Although it has been many years since I graduated, I had the honour of meeting up with Dr. Shaw this past spring.  He reminded me of this story.

 

There was one case that I was working on and I used the phrase, “… the financial manager felt that it would be best to …”.  In a few other paragraphs I also used a similar phrase that included some tense of the word “feel”.  The draft came back to me with a big red “X” through it.  I went to see Dr. Shaw to ask him what was wrong and he said, “ a financial manager may conjecture, may believe, may calculate, may speculate …etc., but a financial manager never feels!”  I got the message.

 

It raises an interesting question though – does a risk manager “feel”, or does a risk manager always have to calculate, conjecture, speculate etc.?  While I may agree that a financial manager may not feel, I believe due to the nature of the risk manager’s role that indeed they do have to feel.  Unfortunately risk management is not an unambiguous science – and nor is it ever likely to be.

 

 

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