Should I burn some bridges?
“Sometimes you get the best light from a burning bridge.”
—Don Henley, American musician
While hedging bets in business, or in life generally, is sometimes prudent, it always eats into potential rewards because all hedges come at a price. Hedging bets is analogous to putting a bridge in place to provide an exit if things go wrong; i.e., a plan B if plan A goes awry. By contrast, burning bridges is analogous to foregoing the protection afforded by plan B. Since hedging bets isn’t free, it makes sense to perform a cost/benefit analysis when considering whether enacting/retaining plan B is worthwhile.
For example, I led a project finance unit at a major international bank for several years. Our specialty was burning bridges! During my tenure, we financed various projects through non-recourse loans, often in the hundreds of millions of dollars. These ranged from aluminum smelters to metallurgical coal mines to Marvin Davis’ acquisition of 20th Century Fox. Because of the non-recourse nature of the loans, the credit risk exceeded that of a typical corporate loan.
Non-recourse means that our loans were secured solely by the project without recourse to the assets of the corporate sponsor. If the project were unable to repay our loans from its own cash flow, the bank had no recourse to the project sponsor since the sponsor’s risk was contractually limited to the amount of equity they had invested in the project. Our reward was a higher rate of return (interest and fees) than we would have earned by making the loan directly to the sponsor. Thus, our cost/benefit analysis focused on determining whether the reward from not requiring a bridge to the sponsor was attractive in the context of the project’s risk profile.
Sometimes, out of fear of being open about our faith, we hide our light under a bowl.
The concept of hedging has application to our faith walk in the marketplace. Sometimes, out of fear of being open about our faith, we hide our light under a bowl. In essence, we are hedging the perceived risks of being authentic to our true identity. Those risks include the possibilities of rejection and career limitation. It’s important to note, however, that we mitigate these by performing with excellence in our leadership roles. After all, we are called in our professional life to work as unto the Lord, the greatest ever exemplar of excellence!
As unpacked in my book “More Than Your Business Card,” leaders desiring to follow Jesus in the marketplace are called to be authentic to their true identity as believers in Jesus. This means being open about our faith with our professional peers. After all, they are most unlikely to darken the doors of a church. Given our credibility in their eyes, we may be the only ones in a position to share the Good News with them.
By avoiding openly living out our faith in the marketplace, we have essentially built a bridge to avoid the consequences of following Jesus in that realm. However, we are overlooking the reality that ultimate fulfillment can only be realized by answering Jesus’ call to marketplace ministry. In my experience, the rewards of bridge burning far outweigh the perceived benefits of hedging.
Do you need to burn any worldly bridges?
Photo by Aleksandr Barsukov on Unsplash
