A lesson in Risk Management from Batman
- Mar 6, 2015
- 3 min read
This is in part a very short review of the JLA “Tower of Babel” comic, an admission of another mistake I’ve made as a self-publishing author, and a bit of general life/professional advice.
To summarize Tower of Babel, Ra’s al Ghul an eco terrorist decides that he needs to wipe out the human race to save the world. Relatively sound logic, still rude. In order to accomplish this he will need to get the Justice League out of the picture. To do this he steals Batman’s secret files that outline the weaknesses of each member of the League and how to best exploit them. In the end good triumphs over evil, but Batman is expelled from the League because the other heroes can no longer trust him. It was a lot of fun.
Why did he Batman do this?
Batman is successful for one major reason, his risk management. He looks at every possible scenario and plans accordingly; in this case he saw the potential that the world’s greatest heroes may become villians and needed to have a plan. There was another comic called Justice, which is also incredible (Braniac with the help of every major villian work to take out the League as well). There is a point near the end where they acknowledge the difference between how a robot (Braniac) and Batman plans is their flexibility. Braniac planned for every possible contingency, except for the possibility of something going wrong. As a result when things did go wrong he didn’t have the ability to fix the issue.
Now here is where I reinforce my two key points, the best risk management is planning for every level of risk and being flexible enough to change the plan in the event of failure or any other disruption.
So here is what I did wrong.
My new book “O.P. #7” was scheduled for release March 25, pre-order beginning March 4. Each platform Kindle, iBooks, Smashwords, and Createspace operates differently, with different rules.
I learned that Createspace doesn’t do pre-order and I accidently released it on the 2nd. Even after shutting all distribution channels it remained in the store, not sure how it would get to my readers, but there it was.
iBooks has the best planning support, start and stop dates. I really liked it, but it doesn’t transfer italics from my manuscript to their formatting program and since I value my time I chose not to format through their platform directly.
Kindle on the other hand was where I made my mistake. It was my mistake too. I didn’t understand the pre-order date selection. I thought I set pre-order up to start on the 4th. I didn’t, I made it available on the 4th; pre-order started the day I loaded my manuscript. Lesson learned.
I didn’t realize I pushed my book live until I started seeing reviews pop up. A pre-order book can’t be reviewed so when I saw one I realized something was wrong.
Now, I said Batman makes a plan for everything, but part of risk management is being flexible enough to support something going wrong. All I did was bump up every action I planned to do on the 25th.
The takeaway that I want everyone to have here is that we could all benefit from the lessons that Batman has to teach us. Plan for everything, but be flexible enough to switch gears if the unforseen does happen. Or more simply, be like Batman.
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