ORacle
The Karate Instructor's Parable
by Douglas A. Samuelson
The shouts and laughter of the group of nine- and 10-year-old boys had faded, as most of them had changed back into street clothes and left the karate class. The OR/MS analyst's son was one of the stragglers, partly because he had been accepting the others' congratulations on passing a test for the next, higher level. Eventually the instructor strolled over, too, to add his own compliments.
"He's doing well," he told the analyst.
"So is he well on the way to being invulnerable?" the analyst kidded the instructor.
"No one is invulnerable," the teacher replied. "Not even me, not even my teacher, not even the head of our whole worldwide school. But he is very good now at countering a few of the more common threats."
The analyst said nothing, but his facial expression showed that the idea had surprised him and started him thinking.
"He can resist a mugger who just walks up and tries to grab him," the instructor elaborated, "but not one with a knife, and certainly not one with a gun. In fact, not even one who approaches from behind and takes him completely by surprise with an effective hold. You see, vulnerability is not just how strong you are, it's what threats you cannot stop."
"That's an interesting idea," the analyst remarked, "and one I hadn't thought about. Maybe this is where I've been getting stuck in my own work!" "How so?" the instructor asked. "What sort of work do you do?"
"Risk assessment," the analyst explained. "I've spent much of my career analyzing investment opportunities for big corporate clients, helping them understand how much risk they're taking. Lately I've been pulled into some, er, let's say national security subjects, because I'm supposed to be good at calculating risks.
"And I've been stuck!" the analyst continued. "They want to know how safe they are against all kinds of things, especially ones they haven't thought about — and that means I probably haven't thought about those things either! After all, we all found out last September how hard it can be to anticipate everything."
"Even in investments," the instructor pointed out. "The investment world hasn't been doing so well lately, either."
"Some parts have done better than others," the analyst said with a little smile. "Some of us did see the downturn coming, and how hard it would hit high-tech companies that had gotten high-priced without actually earning much. But at least there, even if you didn't know their products and their markets, you could read a business plan and figure out they hadn't thought about how to make a profit if conditions turned out less than ideal. Now, with all this concern about terrorism and sabotage, they want to know everything that could be done to them and what they can do about it. It's a lot harder."
"And now you see why," the karate instructor smiled. "You don't know what threats are likely to happen. My wife, who is four-feet-eleven and weights about 95 pounds, can travel around without a bodyguard, even though she is not strong and not good at karate. The head of our worldwide school, who is much stronger and, obviously, adept in martial arts, does need a bodyguard, because there are people who want just to be able to say they successfully attacked a martial arts master. The president of the United States is bigger, stronger and healthier than my wife, and you see what kind of protection he requires."
"I see," the analyst nodded. "It's really more about who's after you and what they can do than how powerful you are! So finding out about that is more valuable than concentrating on protecting against every conceivable threat!"
"Up to a point," the instructor corrected gently. "Some simple precautions have great benefit. But, yes, after you have done those, finding out more about the potential attackers is worth more than building a fortress. And yes, Americans often seem to miss this — sometimes so badly it seems as if it might be on purpose."
"What do you mean?" the analyst inquired.
"Americans like to try to solve everything with technology first, then maybe with changes in management policy," the instructor stated. "But this often means ignoring important details. For example, do you remember all the fuss from the car companies, in the 1980s, about how hard it was to sell in Japan?"
"Sure," the analyst affirmed. "I remember writing a few things about that myself."
"And how long was it," the instructor continued, "before some TV reporter who accompanied President Bush to Japan in 1991 noticed that the Japanese drive on the left, like the British, and your car companies don't make cars with the steering wheel on the right?"
"Yeah, I remember that. I'd missed it, too," the analyst confirmed somewhat sheepishly. "But they really were putting up some trade barriers, as well."
"And your companies were not really so worried about Japanese not buying American cars," the instructor said. "They were worried about Americans not buying American cars. For too long, the American companies kept trying to sell style and power and luxury, and people found the Japanese cars more reliable and less expensive to drive. The American companies kept investing too much in improving what they already did well and too little in finding out what the competition was trying to do to them — just as the U.S. government seems to have been doing, and may be doing still!"
Douglas A. Samuelson is president of InfoLogix, Inc., a consulting company in Annandale, Va. He is also an adjunct professor at The George Washington University and at the University of Pennsylvania, and an external research professor at the Krasnow Institute, George Mason University.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2002 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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