When to Listen to a Dire Warning

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2017

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism adviser to U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, has made a career of investigating disaster warnings. The way he sees it, catastrophes can happen at any time, so why should decision makers ignore a Cassandra? Now a cybersecurity firm CEO, Clarke is an expert at figuring out who is a conspiracy theorist and who is a credible source. He explains his method through a few case studies—on the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, and others—from his new book, “Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.
0:05.9	HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous
0:11.9	leaders through raw honest career questions
0:14.6	that we all face.
0:15.9	Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free
0:18.3	wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Idea cast from Harvard Business Review.
0:33.0	I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.
0:35.7	We're rational creatures.
0:37.6	We know that just because something unbelievably bad
0:40.0	hasn't happened to us doesn't mean it will never happen. Practically though we often
0:44.5	act like everything's going to be just fine and we don't like to listen to the people
0:48.7	who warn us otherwise. There's this scene in The Big Short, the movie about the months leading up to the 2007 financial crisis.
0:57.0	An investor storms into a hedge fund manager's office to tell him he's wrong.
1:01.0	There is no real estate bubble.
1:03.0	So Mike Burry, a guy who gets his haircut at supercuts and doesn't wear shoes,
1:09.0	knows more than Alan Greenspan and Hank Paulson.
1:12.0	Yeah, Dr. Mike Burury, yes he does.
1:14.8	Mike Bury, the hedge fund manager here, is the type of eccentric prophet of doom who fascinates
1:19.6	Richard Clark.
1:21.4	The former White House Counterterrorism Advisor calls these characters Cassandra.
1:25.2	That's from the Greek myth about the cursed Princess Cassandra. She could see disaster
1:30.3	coming but couldn't make anyone believe her.
	...

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