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…
The winding rivers of risk management
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…
Risk management and cognitive biases
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…
Passwords, LinkedIn and the White Rabbit
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…
JPMorgan 24601
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…
Under the Dome risk management
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…
The Walking Dead and risk management
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…
Real Human Beings and the Elephant Man
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…
The Night’s Watch and the Wall of risk management
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…
Maslow, Ned Stark and the Common Good
Last week Ted Coine asked ‘what ever happened to the Common Good?’ At some point people stopped doing the right thing and started putting their individual selfish interests ahead of those of their organizations, countries or kingdoms: UBS, the nation…