Extract from "Churchill on Leadership": On Avoiding Risk

Avoiding risks in business is the route to failure. Avoiding risks in politics, however, is the route to a long career in office. A failed risk in politics is far more dangerous than a failed risk in business. In business, shareholders and customers quickly forgive you if you recover from a disaster – think of Coca-Cola after the "New Coke" debacle, or Ford after the Edsel. But in politics, partisans will keep alive and distort and magnify any failure or mistake in your career. Often small mistakes are punished more severely than disasters.

Churchill observed, "In all great business very large errors are excused or even unperceived, but in definite and local matters small mistakes are punished out of all proportion."

This is one reason politicians are risk-averse, and why modern government administration seeks to minimise risk and avoid failure through a mindless bureacratic process that delivers mostly mediocrity.

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