Risk Archives - Page 10 of 15 - understand-culture

The Buck Stops with Me

On April 19, 1993, the FBI moved against the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. The compound burned, and 76 people inside died, 25 of them children. Attorney General Janet Reno had approved the operation.

That night she went on television. On Nightline she said: “This was a judgment I made.” And: “I think the responsibility lies with me.” On Larry King Live she said: “It is my decision. The buck stops with me. I am responsible for it.” Newsweek wrote that her candor gave her “instant cachet.”

Heart Surgeons by Name

New York State requires every cardiac surgeon to report the results of bypass operations. In late 1991, after a lawsuit by the newspaper Newsday under the state’s Freedom of Information Law, the state released death rates for individual surgeons by name, adjusted for how sick the patients were.

Surgeons responded. In a survey published in 1999, a majority of the New York heart surgeons surveyed said they had refused to operate on at least one high-risk patient. Accounts of the survey give the share as 62% or 67%. In a survey published in 2005, 79% of interventional cardiologists in New York said the report cards influenced whether they offered angioplasty to high-risk patients.

Rats in the Warehouse

In 1975 the Supreme Court upheld the criminal conviction of John Park, the chief executive of Acme Markets. Acme was a national food chain with about 36,000 employees and 874 stores. Food in one of its warehouses in Baltimore had been “held in a building accessible to rodents.” Park was fined $50 on each count.

The Court, quoting an earlier decision, said that the food law “dispenses with the conventional requirement for criminal conduct—awareness of some wrongdoing.” It was enough that Park “had a responsible relation to the situation” and the power to prevent or correct it. Lawyers call this the Park doctrine.

In 2016 a federal appeals court upheld three-month prison sentences for Jack and Peter DeCoster, the owner and the chief operating officer of an egg company. In 2010 about 56,000 Americans had fallen ill with salmonella from contaminated eggs. The two had pleaded guilty to misdemeanors under the food law. Their liability rested on the Park doctrine.

The No-Fault Clawback

On October 26, 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted Rule 10D-1. It carries out Section 954 of the Dodd-Frank Act. Every listed company must have a policy to take back incentive pay, such as cash bonuses and stock awards tied to financial results, from its executive officers when it has to restate its financial results.

The rule reaches back three years and covers former executives as well as current ones. Fault does not matter. Recovery “is required regardless of whether the executive officer engaged in any misconduct.”

The Engagement Partner’s Name

An audit of an American public company is signed by the audit firm. Since 2017, the public can also learn the name of the one partner who led it. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board adopted the rule in December 2015. For audit reports issued on or after January 31, 2017, the firm must file a Form AP that gives “the name of the engagement partner.”

The board said the rule was “intended to provide increased transparency and accountability for key participants in issuer audits.”

The buck stops here

Truman kept a sign on his desk in the Oval Office reading exactly that, and used the phrase repeatedly to describe the presidency. The buck is passed, in American usage, from one person to another. The sign announces where the passing ends — at a named individual, in a specific room.

The DRI

Directly Responsible Individual. Apple’s internal practice attaches a single name to every item on a meeting agenda, and the name is visible to everyone. American project management more broadly insists on one accountable person per item, and the phrase single throat to choke is used without embarrassment.

Owner

Product owner. Process owner. Account owner. Risk owner. Problem owner. American organizations name roles after possession of the thing rather than responsibility for a function, and the word carries the expectation that the owner acts without being asked.

The OODA loop

John Boyd, a US Air Force colonel, built a model of decision-making out of his experience of air combat: observe, orient, decide, act, then repeat. His central claim was about speed — that cycling through the loop faster than your opponent is what wins, because it leaves them reacting to a situation that has already changed. As a Weapons School instructor he was nicknamed Forty Second Boyd, for his standing bet that starting from a position of tactical disadvantage he could defeat any student pilot within forty seconds.

The model spread from the Air Force into American business and sports coaching. It is a formal argument that acting quickly beats acting correctly.

Good Samaritan laws

Every US state has legislation protecting a bystander who intervenes in an emergency from being sued for the consequences. The legal system identified hesitation as the problem and removed the reason for it.