Six lessons on crisis that help explain why we’re still in one:
- When you don’t reinvent institutions at a time of systemic failure, the problems they’re creating don’t just magically disappear.
- When you prop up (read: bail out) the institutions causing the crisis, instead of reinventing them, the crisis will deepen.
- When dysfunctional institutions prop one another up, prosperity’s a house of cards. Crisis becomes stagnation.
- When propping up failed institutions has drained your resources, you’ve turned a crisis into a catastrophe.
- The longer it takes you to see a crisis for what it truly is, the disproportionately worse it’s likely to get.
- When people who are prisoners of the
paradigm that caused the crisis are in charge of fixing it, bet on…more crisis.
Piqued your interest? Read the whole article by Umair Haque in the Harvard Business Review here: Market Correction? Try Perma-Crisis Or read his book- click on the the book image above to go to Amazon where the Kindle edition is only $2.69.
My take: We’re living in the polar opposite of “If it aint broke don’t fix it”- If it’s broke you can’t fix it by propping up the bad actors.
Big thanks to Barry Ritholtz once again for finding voices that lead to new thinking on subjects that seem to have been settled decades ago.