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By *oggone OP Man
over a year ago
Derry |
The Premonition by Michael Lewis. I just finished it and it tells a story, maybe the story about Covid-19 and the people that predicted it, tried to plan and how they were hindered.
If you're stuck for your next read, I highly recommend it. |
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Thank you for that recommendation.
If anyone want to know more, do a Google Search for "The Premonition by Michael Lewis".
There is a Guardian review of the book in the first few hits.
It sounds sobering and well worth a read (or listen on Audible).
I think this quote for the article was interesting.
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"The Premonition ends on a profoundly depressing note, with Dean abandoning the civil service to found a healthcare startup.
“She’d entered the private sector,” writes Lewis, “with the bizarre ambition to use it to create an institution that might be used by the public sector.”
When she tells people in the business world that she wants to save the country from another Covid-like catastrophe, she says, she gets blank looks.
But when she tells them she wants to do “private government operations”, like a kind of healthcare Blackwater, their eyes light up.
“Oh wow,” they say, “you could take over the world.”"
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Which kind of sums up an experience I had once pitching to a Company Board the need for Disaster Recovery and Contingency Planning for the company's systems.
Blank looks all round, when I talked about risks, reputational damage, loss of income, weaker market positioning,
blah blah blah.
I changed tack 15 mins in, as I could see no one was taking this seriously.
I explained the reason for the meeting was not just to discuss the risk, but reveal we'd been hacked. We had lost everything. All our data was leaked online. We were finished.
You could have heard a mouse fart in that room. Very white faces all round.
After a moment's pause, I 'fessed up. It was a lie. But this was the conversation I would be having in the future with them if investment wasn't made to mitigate the risks.
Suffice to say, cheque books came out.
Sometimes you have to use Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt to blimming well motivate people, especially non-technical ones.
The book looks very promising.
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