I found time to read a book-a-week in 2012 and thought I would share my top ten. Look for riskczar on Goodreads. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach Sutton by J.R Moehringer 11/22/63 by Stephen King The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler Wool (Omnibus Edition) by Hugh Howey Under the Dome by Stephen King The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
I’m off to Virginia Beach later this month so it seemed fitting that today’s post has a beach theme. This quote comes from Chapter 7 of Nathan Englander’s book “The Ministry of Special Cases” and you should remember these words whenever someone like me asks you to think about your organization’s risks. “It’s like standing in the ocean and facing the beach. It’s up to you to know what’s behind you. There’s always another wave coming, building in force and crashing down.”
In the novel Time and Again by Jack Finney, he writes about Einstein’s theory of time travel this way: “we’re mistaken in our conception of what the past, present, and future really are. We think the past is gone, the future hasn’t happened, and that only the present exists. Because the present is all we can see. It’s only natural. (Einstein) said we’re like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can’t see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But, it’s there.” Since risk…
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of putting many people in a room to discuss and assess risks you’d know that not everyone assesses every risk the same way. To some a particular risk is high, while to others it is low or non-existent (“C’mon, that’s not a risk!”) But why is that? In a 2011 article by Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman, they explain that executive are “overoptimistic” which can be traced to “cognitive biases – to errors in the way the mind processes information – and to organizational pressures”. They go on to write that this optimism is…
With the news this morning that your eHarmony or LinkedIn password was posted on a Russian website, people are frantically changing their passwords today. Or so one hopes. Why all the urgency? Should anyone be concerned that some troublemakers are going to hack your LinkedIn profile and change your Harvard MBA to one from Ohio State (oh the humanity) or change your eHarmony preferred mate preference from athletic to BBW (oh the humanity)? What you should really be worried about is that your stolen password can also be used to access your bank accounts or email. (Oh, I hadn’t thought about that!) In…
Many of us are familiar with Jean Valjean, the protagonist from Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, made more famous in the 80s thanks to the musical of the same name. In the story, Monsieur Valjean is sent to a prison camp for stealing a loaf of bread: 5 years for the crime and 14 more for attempted escapes. Jump forward 200 years and people are no longer stealing bread but generating losses on a much larger scale for their financial institutions. Last year it was $2 billion and UBS and today it is $2 billion at JPMorgan (which appears to…
In Stephen King’s novel, Under the Dome, a small town in Maine becomes suddenly cut off from the outside world by “an invisible barrier of unknown origin”. If that sounds a bit too much like the Simpsons Movie or science fiction for you, simply replace the dome with any other sort of hazard (earthquake, avalanche, flood), force good (and bad people) to fend for themselves and watch mayhem ensue. It was an excellent book. Without getting into the details of the plot and characters it made me think about disaster preparedness: lots of folks had generators but not enough…
If there are two things you have noticed about this blog, I often write about zombies and the Moment of Risk Enlightenment. Today’s post combines both. (Note: This post contains spoilers about season two of the Walking Dead.) I was catching up on season two of the “post-apocalyptic” television show The Walking Dead this week. In episode seven the survivors learn that the Greene family barn is full of walkers (zombies). Up to this point the farm represented a safe haven; they had not seen any walkers on the farm since they arrived. Impact and likelihood were low. But was…
Perhaps one of the most famous movie quotes from my childhood was from the 1980 movie ‘The Elephant Man‘ based on the life of Joseph (John) Merrick, a severely deformed man in 19th century London. At one point in the film Merrick cries out to an angry mob “I am not an animal! I am a human being! I … am … a … man!” After all, does it really matter what we look like, how much money we make, where we pray or who we cuddle up with at night? No, because we are all just human beings. Last…
In the series A Song of Ice and Fire which begins with the book A Game of Thrones, by George RR Martin, we are introduced to the Wall and the Night’s Watch. The Wall is an immense fortification on the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms that defends the realm from “what lies North of the wall”. It was created over 8000 years ago and measures 300 miles in length and 700 feet in height. The protectors of the Wall are a military order clad in black known as the Night’s Watch and they are as old as the…
