Managers have a strong normative reaction to risk and risk taking. They care about
their reputations for risk taking and are eager to expound on their sentiments about the
deficiencies of others and on the inadequacy of organizational incentives for making
risky decisions intelligently. The rhetoric of these values is, however, decidedly twopronged.
On the one hand, risk taking is valued, treated as essential to innovation and
success. At the same time, however, risk taking is differentiated from "playing the
odds." A good manager is seen as "taking risks" but not as "gambling". To a student of
statistical decision theory, the distinction may be obscure since the idea of decision
making under risk in that tradition is paradigmatically captured by a vision of betting,
either against nature or against other strategic actors. From that perspective, the choice
of a particular business strategy depends on the same general considerations as the
choice of a betting strategy in a game of poker. The significance of this parallel has been
recognized by decision engineers who have tried, with only modest success, to champion
a criterion for evaluating managers that rewards "good decisions" rather than
"good outcomes", arguing that the determination of a proper choice should not be
confounded with the chance realizations of a risky situation.