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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By Rob Downey Vercingetorix surrenders to Caesar by Alphonse Marie de Neuville (31 May 1835 – 18 May 1885)

This is the second time in 2009 I have risked the use of a military tale to support my view about the best use of credit insurance (CI). The Discretionary Credit Limit (DCL) is the topic for this post, so it is perhaps appropriate for me to take a few “discretionary” risks in framing my recommendation, but first the historic context:

For six months in 53-52 B.C., Julius Caesar and twelve legions, numbering 60,000 Roman regulars, pursued Vercingetorix, principal leader of the Gauls, and his 80,000 warriors through what today is Northern France.  By summer, the Romans were able to trap and besiege the Gauls on a plateau near modern-day Alise-Sainte-Reine, fifteen miles NW of Dijon.  To secure his elusive foe, Caesar had his legionnaires circumvallate the entire Alesian plateau with an 11-mile wall comprised of a twelve-foot-high earthen palisade, behind a double row of deep ditches. The encircling work took a month.  The trapped Gallic leader sent riders out for reinforcement. Caesar let the couriers “escape”, and allied tribes marched to the relief of Alesia, 250,000 strong.

While waiting, Caesar had his army dig a second “outer” wall, or contravallation, 13 miles long.  When it was finished, Caesar was intentionally and irremediably “trapped” in a dug-earth doughnut, expecting to be assaulted all around by the largest army ever to attack Roman troops. Incredibly, history records that the legions won the four-day battle which ensued. Casualties were thirty to one in Rome’s favor; Vercingetorix was captured; 100,000 other captives were dispersed.

The practical application for better credit risk management: Outnumbered five-to-one on his opponent’s home field, Caesar trusted in the professionalism and competence of his team and put his Legions in a position calculated to give them maximum opportunity to assert their advantages, i.e., superior ability at close-in fighting, in ranks enhanced by elevated and protected defensive positions.  He moved toward his problems, dug into the risk he faced, and thereby avoided being either destroyed piecemeal over months of guerrilla warfare, or surrounded and overrun on the plains of Gaul.

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