When you train your employees to be risk averse, then you're preparing your whole company to be reward challenged.

Spurlock’s line applies a filmmaker’s logic to organizational culture: if a company systematically discourages risk—through policies, incentives, or punishment for failure—it also suppresses the experimentation that produces outsized gains. “Risk averse” becomes a training outcome, not a personality trait, and the collective effect is a firm optimized for avoiding mistakes rather than discovering opportunities. The phrase “reward challenged” reframes the cost of caution as a capability gap: the organization may still function, but it becomes less able to innovate, adapt, or compete in environments where learning requires trying, failing, and iterating. It’s a warning about how internal norms shape strategic results.