What's the remainder?

Unless you have been camping with the penguins in far away Antarctica for the last two years, you too must have,at some point, felt the tremors of the ongoing global recession.We all pretty much have a basic idea as to what caused all this mess - the subprime mortgage crisis in the US.When I first read about it, it really set me thinking as to what drove all those great wall street Banks to take such risky bets in the housing market.
I mean, c'mon these are the same guys,the brightest and the best from Ivy league schools that built those world class insitutions.I know ,I can hear you say that in the heady days of the stock market boom,they just flew with the current to meet their targets to keep their shareholders smiling.But, isn't a true winner one that can discern hype over reality,style over substance and the noise over the nuances?
And who really got affected in all this mess? it is the average joes/janes who lost their jobs/businesses - people like you and me, the sole breadwinners of families with mouths to feed.

"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers the most" - African proverb


So what's the take-away for us from this ? - whatever be the collective IQ of an institution,success in the long run is truly dependant on their collective EQ (emotional quotient).
In most corporate mission statements,you will see this rephrased with words such as Integrity,Honesty,Trust etc.For firms dealing with vast amounts of other people's money, like the investment banks, adhering to the above principles is even more pertinent.
In anycase,since we all embrace the successes of capitalism, we must welcome the putrid smell of its dark under belly too.

In a broader sense, we can go on to say that the basic instincts of greed,anger,lust,jealousy etc have a greater power over our IQ.While our IQ is busy doing its job of dissecting the objective reality and doing it well, these monsters (always crouching in the wings) pounce on to the arena. If you notice, the modus operandi of these thugs differs -
Greed and jealousy plan their plots over time,wait for an opportunity and move in for the kill when they smell blood.Whereas anger and lust are instinctive and occur in short spurts.They fizzle out as quickly as they ooze out. But in that short window of time, they can blank out your discrimination (and make it seem as if it had never existed in you) and make you do stuff that sometimes may result in irreversible damages. There is an old saying that is right on target.It goes -
"When you go after the rapture of moments, you lose the peace of years!!"

So let's judge our successes not by the intelligence "quotient" , but by the "remainder" that remains after the division is done :-)