Leadership Without Excuses: How to Create Accountability and High-Performance (Instead of Just Talking About It)

CHAPTER 11PREVENT EXCUSES BEFORE THEY HAPPEN

Reflecting on the financial meltdown that began in 2008, history professor Jerry Muller observed:

“This may be our first epistemologically driven depression. (Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and limits of knowledge, with how we know what we think we know.) That is, a large role was played by the failure of the private and corporate actors to understand what they were doing. Most heads of ailing or deceased financial institutions did not comprehend the degree of risk and exposure entailed by the dealings of their underlings.”¹

Adds Nick Paumgarten: “Many of the people responsible for evaluating the [financial] engineering [that led to the crisis] considered their ...