By Rob Downey

A successful NCAA Division I and U.S. Olympic men’s basketball coach is reputed to have said, "I don’t recruit winners." Instead, he looked for the competitive kid, the one who indicated a willingness to prepare daily for a chance to succeed at a more intense challenge than any previously experienced.

If you have learned nothing else in coming through the global financial downturn, you have learned at least what the famous coach implied: "winners" are a dime a dozen. That is, many of the people in your purview – whether peers, supervisors, clients, lenders, or underwriters – were winners in 2007, i.e., they were at their best when times were good. Some of these erstwhile winners were probably “found out” during the 2008-09 crisis, uncovered by the advent of hardening circumstances.

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By Rob Downey

Commercial airline passengers benefit everyday from flight crews who, by law, tradition and training, follow pre-flight checklists. My view is that the use of checklists to maintain high standards in the performance of important recurring team tasks should be studied in business schools.  What has this got to do with trade credit insurance, trade finance and the management of political risks?  ICBA USA uses a wide variety of lists in our global brokerage business to assist, educate, and guide ourselves as well as our global credit-insured clientele.

One of the most recent and striking confirmations of the efficacy of using lists as touchstones to guide high performance comes from the medical profession.  In case you have not heard it, I synopsize below the story of how empowered nurses armed with checklists in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Johns Hopkins Medical Center managed to dramatically improve patient outcomes at what was already one of the world’s finest hospitals.

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