Are people risk averse?  Or do they like risk?  Would you believe those questions don’t matter, when trying to understand risk?

Today we’re being told that the bankers who ran some of the world’s largest investment banks were taking ridiculous risks – and the decisions to take on those risks is now undoing financial services globally.  Were these bankers all gunslingers – willing to take crazy risks?  Would you believe me if I said they didn’t think they were taking much, if any risk?

Risk is a relative term.  What’s "risky" is really a matter of perception.  Let’s say I drive to work on a local highway every day.  The traffic cruises at 65 miles per hour, but since I’m always late I drive 75.  On a particularly late day I drive 80.  Because I usually drive 75, the relative risk seems small.  But the reality is that at 80 the chances of a minor mishap becoming a disaster are far greater.  Once you are comfortable driving 75, the perception of greater risk is only the marginal difference between 75 and 80 – so it seems small.  Over time, if I choose to keep driving a bit faster, within short order I’ll be driving 100 miles per hour.  This may seem crazy – yet there are many drivers on Germany’s high-speed autobahn highways that drive this fast – and faster!!  To those of us who poke along every day at 65 miles per hour these speed demons of the autobahn seem to be taking a crazy risk – but to them, working up to those high speeds gradually over time, the relative risk now seems quite small.

And this is what happens in our business.  When a bank takes a deposit, it then can loan money.  But should it lend dollar for dollar – deposit compared to loans?  While nonbankers might say "don’t lend more than you borrowed" that seems ridiculously conservative to bankers.  Bankers say that because most loans are repaid, they only need enough deposits to cover the normal ebb-and-flow of the cash demands on the institution.  So they feel comfortable loaning out 2 or 3 dollars for every dollar of deposit.  Of course, the more loans the banker makes and the rarer defaults occur, the more likely the banker will start to give loans that are 4 times the amount on deposit.  Where does this stop?  We know with Lehman Brothers the leverage reached 30 to 1 (read about financial institution leverage and regulatory recommendations here)!!!  It didn’t take many defaults for Lehman to suddenly find itself unable to meet its obligations and disappear.

The bankers at Lehman Brothers learned not to fear what they knew.  Not only that, but they hired immensely smart mathematicians and physicists to try calculating the amount of risk they were taking on with their leverage and their obligations.  Using mathematics far beyond the grasp of all but a fraction of the population, they asked scholars to try calculating the risk in the loan packages they sold, and the credit default swaps.  They continuously studied the risk.  The more they studied the easier it was to take on more risk.  The longer they kept doing what they had always done, and the more knowledgable they became, the less risky they perceived their behavior.  Of course, as we now know, Lehman Brothers took on far more risk than the company, its investors and its regulators could afford. 

The other side of this coin is how we perceive things we don’t know.  Almost none of the buggy manufacturers in the early 1900’s transitioned to making automobiles.  To them automobile manufacturing involved engines, and that was too risky.  By the time buggy manufacturers felt they had to change, it was too late.  When we are brought new opportunities to evaluate we don’t evaluate the real merits of upside and downside.  Instead, we first question if the opportunity falls into our realm of expertise.  If not, we deem it too risky.  Because we don’t know much about it, we choose to think it’s too risky for us.  Yet, the risk might be quite low. 

Take for example buying Microsoft stock in the early 1990s as PC sales skyrocketed and Microsoft already had a monopoly on operating systems – and was building its monopoly in office software.  The risk was quite small, since all Microsoft needed was for PCs (PCs made by anybody – it didn’t matter) to continue selling.  That was not a high-risk bet.  Yet most investors shied away because they didn’t understand tech stocks – including Warren Buffet who famously bought a mere 100 shares, declaring he didn’t understand the business!  (Just think, if Warren Buffet had bought a large chunk of early Microsoft, he’d be as rich as himself plus Bill Gates today – now that’s a mind-boggler.)

When markets shift, relative risk can be deadly.  If we continue to perceive things we know as low risk, we will "double down" our bets on customers, market segments, technologies and products that have declining value.  If we think that doing what we always did will produce old returns we will do what’s comfortable, even when the market is moving headlong toward new solutions.  Look at U.S. manufacturers of televisions (remember Quasar, Magnavox and Philco?).  Experts in vacuum tubes and other analog technologies, plus the manufacturing expertise for those components, they were all late seeing the shift to solid-state electronics and all ended up out of business.  All that expertise in the old technology simpy wasn’t worth much when the markets shifted – even though the new technology seemed risky while the old technology seemed familiar, and reliable. 

When markets shift, the greatest risk is the "do what we know" scenario.  Although it’s the easiest to approve, and the most comfortable – especially at times of rapid, dynamic change – it is the one scenario guaranteed to have worsening results.  There’s an old myth that the last buggy whip manufacturer will make huge profits.  Guess again.  As buggy whip demand declines everyone loses money until most are gone.  But there isn’t just one remaining player.  The few who remain constantly see prices beaten down by the excess capacity of buggy whip designers, manufacturers and parts suppliers ready to jump in and compete on a moment’s notice.  Trying to be last survivor just leaves you bloody, beaten up and without resources to even feed yourself.

It’s not worth spending a lot of time trying to evaluate risk.  Because rarely (maybe never) in business is there such a thing as "absolute risk" you can measure.  Risk is relative.  What might appear risky could well be merely a perception driven by what you don’t know.  What might appear low risk could be incredibly risky due to market shifts.  So the real question is, are you Disrupting yourself so you are investigating all the possibilities – good and bad?  And are you keeping White Space alive so you are experimenting, testing new ideas?  New products, new technologies, new markets, new distribution systems, new components, new pricing formulas, new business models —- new Success Formulas?  The only way to avoid arguments of risk is to get out there and do it – so you can get a good handle on what works, and what doesn’t, in order to make decisions based on opportunity assessment rather than Lock-in.