When I first started regularly travelling to Europe back in the mid-1980s, my American colleagues and I used to joke about heading off to The Land of No. We said this because it seemed that whenever we came up with a new business or IT idea, the typical response of our US team was "Cool, let’s try it". But when we presented the very same idea to our European organizations, the first response was inevitably more like "Well, the problem with that is ...". Happily, these differences have narrowed considerably in recent years, as Europe has prospered and America become somewhat less self-assured.

These memories have resurfaced many times over the last year during the research for our project Rethinking Risk. But this time the differences are not between two geographic cultures, but the vastly different management cultures of business and Enterprise IT.