1、中文 6259 字 外文资料翻译 Why the Mindset Matters More Than the Model. Peter Bernstein Forecasting used to be straightforward. Over the years, by the end of the first quarter, managers usually had a fairly reliable sense of how the business was shaping up and whether targets would be met, missed or exceeded.
2、 Confidence in quarterly and annual predictions was so high that coming in above or below by even the smallest amount was considered a surprise and set off moves in stock prices. This year, however, things have changed. Companies like Unilever, Union Pacific and Visteon are declining to make any pre
3、dictions at all for their performance over the months ahead. In other words, all bets are off. According to company reports, the problem is not that these firms are reluctant to provide a gloomy outlook. Instead, the companies say they just dont know which way the markets will go； it seems the globa
4、l economy is so shaky that executives have little confidence in their projections. This means that more and more managers are growing unwilling, at least temporarily, to make judgments about the future and then to act on those beliefs. The danger is that these businesses will become paralyzed - and
5、by extension, the global economy as well. The fundamental issue, of course, is understanding and managing risk. Any time a merger is considered, a new product concept funded or an investment made, success is never guaranteed. Over the years, business has become increasingly sophisticated in developi
6、ng tools that can help in this analysis, especially in financial matters. Complex mathematical models were created to analyze potential outcomes and probabilities, based on past performance. Yet, as has been widely reported in the media, many of these same models failed spectacularly to predict or p
7、repare companies for the current global economic crisis, and major efforts are underway on Wall Street to fix these systems. At the same time, experts at Wharton and elsewhere argue that too much blame is being placed on the risk management model and other tools of the trade, in banking and beyond.
8、The models are not necessarily broken, but instead are only as good as the decisions that get made based on them, they say. As a result, the current crisis may represent an opportunity for companies to re-visit and re-think historical approaches to risk management. When it comes to planning for the
9、future, the new thinking goes, it is not just the model that matters, it is the mindset. I think weve learned a lot recently about the limitations of models, says Richard J. Herring, a professor of international banking and co-director of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center. Weve also seen tha
10、t the governance of risk is not as good as it ought to be. Herring notes that top managers in many companies need to understand what can happen when the assumptions that drive a model change, and then subsequently communicate these scenarios to their boards. Internal audit risks include the inherent
11、 risks and control risks. The inherent risks is the assumption that has nothing to do with internal accounting controls, the units being audited financial statements and the overall balance of the account of a business or the possibility of a major error, that is caused by the audit unit economic ch
12、aracteristics of business and accounting work itself the formation of the lack of audit risk. Some enterprises such as the lack of due attention to the accounting system, account system complex, reducing clarity of accounting information, reports, use of difficulty, cost, cost of lack of cost accoun
13、ting concepts. Control risk refers to as a result of inadequate internal control system perfect, weak internal control behavior, not timely detection and correction of a business account or a major error in the formation of audit risk. Sometimes, even if the auditors audited units to confirm the int
14、ernal control system is unreasonable or out of control in key areas, the amendments proposed by the audit can really suitable for operating activities, but will also create a risk amendment. Re-defining Risk The first step is to get a fuller picture of risk. Most recent coverage of the global econom
15、ic crisis and its origins, particularly from a risk perspective, has focused on the financial industry； the problems with identifying and measuring the risk in this sector kicked off the chain of events that brought the global economy to a near standstill. Some banks were dramatically more exposed t
16、o risks than they thought they were. Most others simply did not know； they could not assess with any confidence the value of their own or others financial assets. But there is more than one kind of risk. U.S. food giant Cargill, for example, earlier this month suffered a blow related to what is typi
17、cally called sovereign risk. Accusing the company of having failed to lower food prices, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stunned Cargill by ordering the seizure of one of its rice plants in the country. Another category of risk that companies face - which is even more common - is operational. The d
18、elays Airbus encountered in the development of its 380 super-size jetliner are a perfect example. Over the course of 2005 and 2006, Airbus pushed back the launch of the new aircraft three times, ultimately leading to the departure of its CEO and a projected earnings shortfall of more than 4 billion
19、euros. Iridium, a company backed by Motorola, experienced an infamous failure related to operational risk. The high-profile satellite phone venture was launched in late 1998 with widespread media coverage, yet it failed within a year. The company was not able to get enough satellites in orbit quickl
20、y enough, causing customer demand to fall far below expectations. These stories illustrate some key points about risk from a managers perspective. The first is that traders, economists and academics think about risk very differently than do most business managers. For the former, the key issue in ri
21、sk is variance - the expected spread of possible outcomes. But that is not how managers think about it. For them, the biggest issue in risk is the potential for loss. As a result, they ask, Whats the downside? If the risk is too high - or even unknown - companies typically pull back. The second poin
22、t is that risk management has no silver bullet. As a result, many companies need to develop a more integrated view of risk. We have seen a tendency to separate risks into rigid silos - operational risk, market risk, credit risk and so on, says Whartons Herring. But what we have found is that major s
23、hocks and problems do not come that way. For instance, in the financial world, you would see trading desks staffed with people who were experts in market risk, but they were trading instruments that were laden with credit risk. The skills you need to think about each of those kinds of risk are very
24、distinctive, and unless you have an integrated view of risk, you could encounter major problems. Nevertheless, risk taking remains what managing is all about, and not just in financial services but in every industry. Indeed, from an economic perspective, all firms fundamentally are in the business of taking risks based on their core capabilities. For the manager, then, the basic objective is simple: As one executive noted in Zur Shapiras 1995 book, Risk Taking: A Managerial Perspective: You have to be a risk taker. But you have to
