Margin Call (2011) - Senior Partners Emergency Meeting [HD 1080p] (Re-Upload / Audio Fixed)

Right. You can't hide the detail with a wave of the hand, you can definitely overcommunicate detail that is unnecessary, but the art of it is finding a way to explain the bit that matters in a way that makes it clear to the users that you're eliding detail that isn't important, without misleading them. There is a very fine example of this in cinema -- the senior partners meeting in Margin Call, where Zachary Quinto's character has to explain why the firm needs to sell all of a particular asset class: [this video] One day I will use the line Jeremy Irons uses in this clip. I don't want to spoil it by quoting it.

Yes indeed. Probably the best cinematic take on that is in the movie Margin Call - here's the senior partners meeting: [this video] Essentially, the dissolution of Glass-Steagall allowed investment banks to create complex financial packages, each one constructed out of dozens if not hundreds of home mortgages. Each individual mortgage was graded but the packages were built out of a mixture of low-grade and high-grade mortgages. Since trading (gambling) with these packages was very lucrative, the investment banks worked with shady mortgage brokers to increase the number of packages by pushing adjustable-rate mortgages on gullible people who probably were not that familiar with compound interest calcululations. These unlikely-to-succeed mortgages were mixed in with the high-qulaity mortages to create a wide variety of highly leveraged financial products, and then bets were placed on the outcomes of trading in these products (derivative markets, synthetic CDO squared nonsense, etc.). Once people realized that many of these mortgages were not going to be paid off, then the avalanche of collapse began. Glass-Steagall, if retained, would have made all of that impossible.

Simple concept, the author is overthinking it. I have been "problem manager" for many large outages. I use the term "problem manager" to remind people that an outage is something you manage just like any other kind of project, except on much shorter time scales. Everything you learned about project management applies to dealing with outages. > Sometimes an investigator needs to go silent for a while to chase down a hunch, or collect some data, or research some question. As long as such a silence is negotiated in advance, with a specific time to reconvene, it can serve a crucial purpose. I call this functional dead air. Hey, if you are the kind of project manager that talks and does not listen to your team... that's a problem. My ideal stance on those occasions is to present myself as somebody who "wants to be educated about the issue". I think it is more helpful and creates less stress. As I am asking questions I am trying to not seem to be interrogating them but instead emphasise I am a noob on the topic but need to learn quickly. My ideal is this scene from Margin Call: [this video] This usually is actually true, btw. There is no single way to do it right but as a manager it is your job to maintain good information flow between you and your reports and on an outage, your reports are essentially everybody involved.