by Michael Arbow, MBA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.
Recently while driving home from my teaching engineering students about entrepreneurship I was listening to the CBC radio program “Ideas” which had at that time a woman who studied the Inuit (the indigenous people of the Canadian arctic) language and by default its culture. One of her more interesting discoveries is that one of the Inuit dialects has a term which best translates to X-ray eyes – in this case it is used to describe the situation a lone hunter may find themselves in when on the ice floes. The idea is that the hunter is alone and with no form of contact with anyone and thus by necessity is forced by themselves to see through all the options that lay before them and “see” their consequences before acting.
This powerful cultural characteristic would be a very desirable trait for a risk manager (and the rest of us). Effectively what the hunter has done is eliminating the “noise”, list the options and play them out to see which has the greatest net benefit or chance of success – be that pure survival or food. This would be a highly desirable trait for a risk manager and the metaphor of survival (no bankruptcy) or food (profitability) is rather fitting.
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