TABLE OF CONTENTS "I like people who do something, not the safe man who stays home."
President Theodore Roosevelt , February 12, 1908, in Times Square at the start of the New York to Paris automobile race
"The failure is the man who stays down when he falls."
David Dunbar Buick
Risk and innovation go hand in hand. Solving the risk versus innovation dilemma is the key to supercharging innovative ideas and performance. The 1908 New York to Paris auto race was about both innovation, determination and risk financial, technical, schedule, temporal, and personal. Those brave men and women who trekked over 21,000 miles across three continents and six countries, crossing mountains and deserts and enduring every environmental extreme in immature unproven technology, were far from home indeed. This chapter explores a method and thought paradigm that can be used in almost any situation to quickly weigh risks and returns and make appropriate goal-based decisions, even when considering immature technologies or ideas early on in the intake phase. This brings us to our ninth I-Factor:
I-Factor 9: Understanding risk organizationally and strategically, by phase, can promote ingenuity and performance.
Corollary to I-Factor 9: The risk of not taking risks often outweighs the perceived cost of a potential failure, especially in today's fast-paced global economy.
Consider the following from Robert Ludlum's novel The Parsifal Mosaic (Random House, 1982):
Undersecretary of State Arthur Pierce breathed deeply, steadily imposing a calm over himself as he had learned to do Whenever a...
