This is a short clip I made of a webinar on Irish air finance which took place in May this year. And yes it is as boring as it sounds but in it the participants revealed a mind-set which I found quite fascinating.
They are talking about the risks today and one of them said that it was easier to make long-term assessments a few years ago - and they all nodded in agreement.
Whatever long-term predictions these guys were making six years ago were obviously completely and utterly wrong given the scale and outcome of the global financial crisis. It may have been easy to make a long-term prediction regarding finance six years ago, but you would have been making a wrong prediction. The difference now is that today it is hard to make a long-term prediction regarding finance that sounds convincing.
It brought home to me just how ingrained the ideology of finance wizardry is within our culture - these guys couldn’t see that their predictions were wrong, all that they could see was how difficult it is today to predict a future with certainty when the present is uncertain. Much better to predict a future with certainty when the present is certain.
You couldn’t get a more boring youtube clip if you tried but the amount of ‘going forward’ talk here is laughable. I sometimes wonder if the financial year is broken up into manageable quarters so that no one is accountable for any decisions taken in any any past quarter.
On another note, for those working in workplaces where meetings and email constitute about 50% of the time, has anyone noticed the decline in decision making, i.e. hot air, in this recession? I think there might be a relationship between the number of people CC’ed in an email and the amount of work done.