|
"It is impossible for ideas to
compete in the marketplace if no forum for The Business Forum Journal
By Sheldon Bachus
The Fable Once, not so long ago, there was a young man who wished to be an auditor. He went to the finest schools, took all the proper courses and graduated quite high in his class. Because he did so well, he was soon hired by a prestigious audit firm. His future seemed quite bright. At first things went well for him in his new profession. He knew that to be a good auditor he must pay attention to detail. So, he always seemed to find things that other auditors missed. And, although his reports were often quite long and sometimes tedious, they were nonetheless well organized and accurate. His manager was impressed, and promoted him to manage a new client account. Then, the young man’s life darkened. He kept producing excellent reports, but his manager appeared unhappy with him and started saying things such as “strategic issues are important”, “think about the global risk environment”, and other statements that did not seem to make much sense. But, the manager was both a reasonable and sensitive person. He knew the young auditor liked to go fishing, so one Friday as the workday was ending he told him about a hidden lake in the nearby mountains. “There are a lot of trout there..” the manager said, and added “…and lots of ospreys as well. Be sure to watch how they catch fish”. The next morning the auditor arrived at the mountain lake at sunrise. The early morning turned into a fine spring day and by mid-morning he had caught quite a few fish. As the water warmed and the trout started to rise for insects, in the distance he heard a quiet chirping. He could see no birds in the tall firs that lined the shore where he was casting, but the chirping continued. Then, looking into the cloudless sky above him, he saw an osprey. Gliding on its powerful six-foot wingspan, the big grey-white bird was over 100 feet above the water, and could see far across the lake. As it banked in great circles, the osprey seemed to be scanning wide reaches of water. Suddenly, the circles tightened. With its attention focused on a rising trout, the osprey plummeted downward and in an explosion of water hit the surface of the lake exactly where the trout had been feeding. Quickly, the osprey rose back into the air with its prize held firmly in its sharp talons, and the bird flew off to its nest. For the remainder of the day the young auditor continued to catch fish, and as he did, the ospreys continued their fishing as well – scanning the lake, watching for rising trout, and plunging downward on their targets. The following Monday when he returned to work, the auditor’s manager asked him how the fishing was and if he saw any ospreys. “Yes, many ospreys..” the young man replied, “..and you know what – I think they would make fine auditors.” A shadow of a smile crossed the manager’s face. The Principle and A Corollary Management effectiveness requires both strategic and tactical vision in equal measure. Serendipity is found somewhere between the trees and the forest. An Application Early in the history of technical assistance programs, a team of expatriate advisors and their local counterparts came together to work on a flood routing model for a large African hydro-electric facility. The purpose of the model was to test the correlation between rainfall and river flow rates into the facility’s reservoir. Although the input data was reasonably good, the resulting correlations were not. Strangely, for a number of backcountry gauging stations, the correlations often would go negative. This did not bode well for future flood-routing efforts. The inverse correlations seemed to appear whenever there were periods of exceptionally high rainfall recorded along the southern periphery of the reservoir’s catchment – an area lying, however, mostly outside the primary watershed. As the team pondered this problem, one of the local engineers offered what would prove to be a very important observation. “Gentlemen,” he began. “Stop looking at the small numbers of the backcountry. For many years before going to university I worked there on my father’s farm. I will tell you this - the farm always suffered when there was rain in the southern highlands. You see, my colleagues, the monsoon moves from south to north. But, it comes as a ribbon flowing like a river from east to west. And, most surely, some years the ribbon is wide and sometimes it is narrow, and sometimes it stays in the southern highlands, and some years the ribbon rests along the Sahel. Those are good years for us all, but when the monsoon ribbon is narrow and rests in the south, your numbers will be small, very small, and have no meaning. You can test this, but you must test for inverse correlation.” So, the project team tested for a high level of negative correlation. Their efforts were quickly rewarded. Indeed, the Sahel benefited when the southern highlands suffered, and vice versa. Reflecting on these new results, the expatriate project leader announced, “Even though our goal is to develop a flood routing model, we must report our findings based on these inverse correlations. With this information we might at least help plan for potential crop failure in the Sahel.” The project leader looked over at the engineer who seemed to want to say something, but remained silent. “Tell us,” the project manager asked the engineer, “should we not report these new findings?” “I tell you, my friend,” the engineer began slowly. “You may report these findings. But, the big men in the capital will not look at them, the big men in New York will not look at them, and the big men in London will not look at them. It is information they do not want to see.”
The engineer was a man of vision in more
ways than one. (The foregoing is of course fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.)
Visit the Authors Web Site
|
