After 30 years in business, I know a thing or two about risk. For example, I know that there are two fundamentally different kinds of risk: rewarded risk and unrewarded risk. The former is smart business strategy, the latter is more or less stupid.
The problem, of course, is that few people ever take risks they believe to be without reward. Which is why looking at perceived rewards is critical to understanding strategy.
No matter what you think about the Senate action on helping car companies, an analysis of the risks reveals dramatically different world views between those who voted yes and those who voted no.
Is there a rewarded risk for those who voted no? You bet. "No" Senators get to burnish their anti-union corporatist credentials. The reward of being seen as a hard-ass is, in their minds, greater than the risk of a full-blown global depression. Said another way, the risk of doing nothing to help the automobile industry is less than the risk of doing the "wrong" thing.
How people and organizations manage risk speaks volumes about what is important to them.
Over the past few decades, the Party of Greed has managed a sea change in the management of risk and reward. They have masterfully orchestrated public policy in ways that generate rewards for the few, while effectively spreading risk to the many.
The Senate vote on the automobile industry is but one more example of this greed in action.