by Rick Nason, PhD, CFA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.
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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