"The Defense Department regrets to inform you that your sons are dead because they were stupid.”
Goose to Maverick, Top Gun, 1986
An exam essay for my graduate-level course in Risk Management and Decision-Making, out of this spring’s two catastrophic implosions:
- Stockton Rush’s submersible Titan, crushed in a nano-second on its descent to take an expensive porthole peek at the disintegrating wreckage of the Titanic, lying 2100 fathoms deep on the floor of the North Atlantic.
- EY global chief executive Carmine DiSibio’s aborted Project Everest, by which he sought but failed to split and separate the accounting and consulting practices of the Big Four network.
Here it would be:
As an exercise in “failure study,” compare and contrast the attitudes and behaviors of Rush and DiSibio, and the sources of bias, error, mis-judgments and other factors contributing to the collapse of their ambitious aspirations.
This course seeks lessons for business, professional and personal choice-making. The semester has just ended and my terrific student cohort has scattered on their summer holidays, so here’s what I would have expected from them –- a comparative exercise in how central themes in human behavior are found and recur across a broad range of examples.
While the literature on flawed decisions is rich with guidance, it converges on the deadly combination of arrogance and ignorance. Over-confident commitment to a triumphal goal –- a visual close-up of the historic wreck site, or the cascade of riches anticipated from the EY separation –- would suppress any appeal to proceed with caution, prudence and counsel with the available expertise of others in the sector: hull design, incremental trouble-shooting, and inclusion of safety and emergency capabilities, on the Titan –- and for Everest, coherent strategic planning, globally functional leadership, and resolution of organizational inadequacies in governance and infrastructure.
Innovation, evolution and boldness of vision lie at the heart of great plans, to be sure. But not even unlimited financial resources can purchase a repeal of the inexorable laws of physics and metallurgy and marine engineering –- nor can boundless hubris and grandiosity evade or bypass the basics of economics and organizational dynamics.
The comparisons extend. The hydrostatic pressures on the hull of the Titan were calculable in terms of the water’s depth and density (P = pgh, for those interested) –- predictably catastrophic forces on a vessel of sub-optimal shape, inadequate testing, and fatigued by multiple descents.
As turns out, the formula has application, by analogy at least, to Project Everest –- the depth of its problems went unmeasured and untested, and the density of its leadership created destructive forces beyond recovery.
There’s one further comparison, grisly in its nature, in an expert engineer’s analysis:
- The Titan’s malfunction and loss of power, de-stabilizing and tipping it out of control to “fall headlong towards the seafloor,” meant that its five passengers –- helplessly piled in the nose of the cabin without lights, communications or workable emergency measures -- likely had about a minute of terrified awareness before its fatal failure.
- Likewise, the plain take-away for Carmine DiSibio in the failure of his head-to-head with EY’s American leader and deal skeptic Julie Boland was that the lights were out on Project Everest, a crash was imminent, and there was no available rescue plan or exit strategy.
Stockton Rush’s mis-adventure in “tourism porn” –- charging obscene ticket prices for a reckless project having no legitimate purpose within the protocols of real science, but induced by incentives lying elsewhere in egoism, emotion or ambition –- will be no more than a blip on the future of deep-water exploration. Further analysis is to come, but early post-mortem reporting on the recovered remains already indicates that the causes of the Titan implosion are well understood in the surfeit of flaws in its design and execution.
The same for Project Everest, and DiSibio’s frustrated conflicts as the would-be leader of a new, publicly-listed consulting enterprise. The debate will continue about the desirability of alternate models for professional services, as across the spectrum from integrated, full-service firms to “audit only” assurance practices completely separated from the expanding array of consultancies in Sustainability, cyber security, artificial intelligence and otherwise. But because history’s best example of the latter is the mixed outcome of the Arthur Andersen divorce of 2001 –- the immense success of the Accenture IPO and that company’s powerhouse growth thereafter, contrasted with the death spiral of the Andersen accounting firm in less than a year –- the next entrepreneur tempted to dive into these cold waters will be wise to study with care the uncharted hazards beneath the surface.
“What will kill you is ‘not knowing what you don’t know’” -- the maxim is captured by the academics as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Critically for lessons to be learned, any complex situation with a non-zero possibility of potentially fatal problems calls for pauses and consultation, analysis of emergent quality issues, and careful attention to dissenting views and disaffirming evidence.
Which apparently did not figure for either Rush or DiSibio –- meaning that the outcomes of both projects were fore-ordained. Titan and Everest are now reduced to rubble and mourning, for reasons traceable to the conduct and behavior of their sponsors and advocates. Further efforts in either area may benefit from their unhappy experience.
Thanks for joining this dialog. Please share with friends and colleagues. Comments are invited and welcome, and subscription sign-up is easy and free -- both at the Main page.