If you like “The Natural,” “Rudy,” The New York Knicks, basketball or any success-out-of-nowhere story, you’ve probably relished hearing about Harvard-grad/point guard Jeremy Lin leading the Knicks to seven straight victories a week after he was a bench-warmer about to be cut from the team.

One of the juiciest aspects of the Lin narrative is that nearly every general manager, scout and metric-crazed talent evaluator in the National Basketball Association shot an air ball in evaluating Lin’s potential as a player — let alone a starter, let alone the global phenomenon he has become in the past week. A related and equally compelling story — relayed in both The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek — shows that at least one basketball talent evaluator got it right: Ed Weiland. more

The votes are in, and a long-term approach to business growth has trounced short-termism!

Really. Wall Street Journal readers cast their ballots Wednesday morning after reading this analysis of Amazon’s decision to lower short-term profitability by making investments in warehouses, technology and tablets that the online retailer expects will improve long-term profitability. more

When practitioners, consultants and academics discuss leading organizational risk management practices, they hone in on people, processes and supporting technology. As major risk management failures in recent years have illustrated, mastering these three dimensions is necessary but not sufficient.

Effective enterprise risk management (ERM) — or any discreet risk management process — hinges on other dimensions as well, including organizational culture, behavior, ethics and change management … all the squishy, human stuff that defies convenient categorization in COSO cubes and other traditional risk management frameworks. more

I’ve been talking to risk management, compliance and internal auditing experts this month to get a feel for how they expect their realms to evolve during the next 12 to 18 months. I’ve heard some interesting ideas. I’ve also heard the same interesting idea repeated more than once; and, as the saying goes, “here’s how journalists (or bloggers) count to three: one, two, trend.”

Count storytelling within the realm of risk management among one of the many trends (including lean GRC, behavioral risk management, principled performance, correlations between business ethics and the bottom line and the death of SAS 70 audits) I’m examining right now. more

As anyone who has picked up a non-fiction book in the past five years knows, we have entered the “You May Be Surprised to Learn…” era.

Data analytic breakthroughs as well as fresh thinking in the realms of behavioral economics, neuroeconomics and other so-called decision-making sciences have taught us, for example, that most drug dealers make less than minimum wage, bonuses are relatively weak incentives and man is definitely not a purely rational economic actor. On Sunday, I also learned how Japan’s economic failure may be a myth. more