Goliath's Curse: Application From The Book to Business Continuity

Goliath's Curse is about societal collapse...and like anything I consume in my personal life, I hear ties to business continuity loud and clear.

Decision-Making

The book talks about the wisdom of crowds and how the knowledge of many beats the few. The flipside is making bad decisions is typical in an oligarchy since they are after their own interest. Poor elite choices lead to inequality and vulnerability which results in a hindered response to disaster which leads to risk of collapse.

I've had many interactions where the COO/CFO is literally begging for a business continuity plan to be done and CEO has decided it's not important. The CFO and COO are meant to oversee the day-to-day operations for the CEO...and the CEO isn't trusting their opinion. One even said to me, with great disasppointment, "if he goes, we're screwed - everything is in his head!" The CEO is the CEO. It is her/his business and the buck stops with them. Even if that means business death/collapse.

Resilience Methods

Speaking of collapse, the book goes into how resilience is the flipside of collapse. Resilience is the ability to experience disturbances without changing functions of identity. Cultural evolution allows societies to survive and prosper in hostile environments. It's really about methods, not individual intelligence. Bigger, longer-living empires passed on their technology and practices to survive and thrive. States developed things to help them regain control after disaster has struck. They may not always get it right, but the disruption is brief. The idea of collapse is disappearing while life quality is improving.

This is plainly about the effort that goes into business continuity. The audit reveals issues and SOPs are developed to handle them. SOPs are the methods. Employees are empowered to respond to a disaster and get back to normal operations. The disruption becomes an annoyance instead of a catastrophe. Everything in a business continuity plan is passed on when the business is sold. Everyone is less stressed and much happier.

Wrong Solutions

Now we move on to cost. "Under the tyranny of the quarterly earnings report, long-term planning takes a back seat." Deeper institutional or behavioral policies are overlooked in favor of a technological fix. Faster, easier, cheaper is the way. Those fixes are more likely to fall apart during a collapse. Everyone will be unprepared. The loss of energy supply or breakdown of infrastructure will cause the technological fixes to be knocked out.

Yes, that is bad news. Which is why I go a few levels deep when I do my plans. It is never just one level deep - I look at the thrid and fourth level downstream effects of a disruption. I think about what happens when your solution, your control measure, is a single point of failure itself because what it relies on likely won't be available. Also, to quote my friend Jennifer Goldman, when you leave something on the back burner for too long, it winds up burning down the house.

Looking back to my first book, How to Not Kill Your Business, my intention has always been to prevent collapse. Collapse of your dream, your employees' paycheck, and the community's enrichment. History does repeat itself. The lessons are there. Combined with my blog on regret, it's easy to see how decisions that created empires also brough them down...which isn't dissimilar from how businesses are run, even small ones.