Decoding Black Swans and Other Historic Risk Events


Book Description

The field of risk science continues to learn from the long history of events to develop principles and practices that enable individuals, organizations, and societies to understand and manage future risk. Reflecting on these histories reminds us that risk and uncertainty are prevalent, yet it remains important to consider what is on the horizon: the possibility of future events, the consequences of those events, our vulnerability to those events, and how to recover from those events. Decoding Black Swans and Other Historic Risk Events offers a guide to understanding risk events and how to act before they occur. This book explores past risk events and analyzes how risk science principles apply to those events and studies whether current risk science concepts and approaches could potentially have avoided, reduced the impact, or supported recovery following the risk event. New insights are obtained by applying recent research progress in understanding and managing risk, considering aspects including quality of evidence, information, and misinformation in risk studies. The analysis results are used to identify how risk science approaches contribute to the overall management of risk and societal safety, and where improvements can be obtained, allowing the reader to possess a toolkit for identifying and planning for unsafe events. This title will be a critical read for professionals in the fields of occupational health and safety, risk management, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, energy, marine engineering, environmental engineering, business and management, and healthcare.




Decoding CEO-Speak


Book Description

The words of business leaders matter. They can spark action, enhance branding, share knowledge, transmit values, and influence social and cultural behavior. Decoding CEO-Speak critiques the public language of a powerful class of people – the Chief Executive Officers of major companies. Interest in the behavior and thinking of CEOs is not confined to their corporation’s direct stakeholders only: the public is increasingly interested in how CEOs stand on current issues and community debate. Through case study analysis of companies such as News Corporation, BP, Wells Fargo, Satyam, Uber, Canadian National Railway, Tesla, and Boeing, authors Russell Craig and Joel Amernic illustrate ways of mining meaning or decoding a CEO’s written words and speeches. They critically examine a variety of public media, including social media, testimony, and speeches, performed by leaders of major companies. Decoding CEO-Speak demonstrates how monitoring the language of CEOs can yield valuable insights into a company’s policy, strategy, and ethicality; and how it can point to the priorities, values, and personality of the CEO. The book will appeal to CEOs, senior managers, and public relations and media consultants, as well as business professors, students, and corporate stakeholders who want to find otherwise disguised meaning in the words of leaders.




Trading Thalesians


Book Description

This book mixes history on the ancient world with investment ideas for traders involved in financial markets today. It goes through ideas such as measuring risk, whether investors should try to outperform the market, Black Swans and ways of creating appropriate investment targets. It will appeal to professional traders and retail investors.




Green Swans


Book Description

Even leading capitalists admit that capitalism is broken. Green Swans is a manifesto for system change designed to serve people, planet, and prosperity. In his twentieth book, John Elkington—dubbed the “Godfather of Sustainability”—explores new forms of capitalism fit for the twenty-first century. If Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Black Swans” are problems that can take us exponentially toward breakdown, then “Green Swans” are solutions that take us exponentially toward breakthrough. The success—and survival—of humanity now depends on how we rein in the first and accelerate the second. Green Swans draws on Elkington’s firsthand experience in some of the world’s best-known boardrooms and C-suites. Using case studies, real-world examples, and profiles on emergent technologies, Elkington shows how the weirdest “Ugly Ducklings” of today’s world may turn into tomorrow’s world-saving Green Swans. This book is a must-read for business leaders in corporations great and small who want to help their businesses survive the coming shift in global priorities over the next decade and expand their horizons from responsibility, through resilience, and onto regeneration.




Changes in Flood Risk in Europe


Book Description

This book delivers a wealth of information on changes in flood risk in Europe, and considers causes for change. The temporal coverage is mostly focused on post-1900 events, reflecting the typical availability of data, but some information on earlier flood events is also included.




Red-Blooded Risk


Book Description

An innovative guide that identifies what distinguishes the best financial risk takers from the rest From 1987 to 1992, a small group of Wall Street quants invented an entirely new way of managing risk to maximize success: risk management for risk-takers. This is the secret that lets tiny quantitative edges create hedge fund billionaires, and defines the powerful modern global derivatives economy. The same practical techniques are still used today by risk-takers in finance as well as many other fields. Red-Blooded Risk examines this approach and offers valuable advice for the calculated risk-takers who need precise quantitative guidance that will help separate them from the rest of the pack. While most commentators say that the last financial crisis proved it's time to follow risk-minimizing techniques, they're wrong. The only way to succeed at anything is to manage true risk, which includes the chance of loss. Red-Blooded Risk presents specific, actionable strategies that will allow you to be a practical risk-taker in even the most dynamic markets. Contains a secret history of Wall Street, the parts all the other books leave out Includes an intellectually rigorous narrative addressing what it takes to really make it in any risky activity, on or off Wall Street Addresses essential issues ranging from the way you think about chance to economics, politics, finance, and life Written by Aaron Brown, one of the most calculated and successful risk takers in the world of finance, who was an active participant in the creation of modern risk management and had a front-row seat to the last meltdown Written in an engaging but rigorous style, with no equations Contains illustrations and graphic narrative by renowned manga artist Eric Kim There are people who disapprove of every risk before the fact, but never stop anyone from doing anything dangerous because they want to take credit for any success. The recent financial crisis has swelled their ranks, but in learning how to break free of these people, you'll discover how taking on the right risk can open the door to the most profitable opportunities.




The Feeling of Risk


Book Description

The Feeling of Risk brings together the work of Paul Slovic, one of the world's leading analysts of risk, to describe the extension of risk perception research into the first decade of this new century. In this collection of important works, Paul Slovic explores the conception of 'risk as feelings' and examines the interaction of feeling and cognition in the perception of risk. He also examines the elements of knowledge, cognitive skill, and communication necessary for good decisions in the face of risk. The first section of the book looks at the difficulty of understanding risk without an emotional component, for example that disaster statistics lack emotion and thus fail to convey the true meaning of disasters and fail to motivate proper action to prevent them. The book also highlights other important perspectives on risk arising from cultural worldviews and concerns about specific hazards pertaining to blood transfusion, biotechnology, prescription drugs, smoking, terrorism, and nanotechnology. Following on from The Perception of Risk (2000), this book presents some of the most significant research on risk perception in recent years, providing essential lessons for all those involved in risk perception and communication.




The Black Swan


Book Description

Set against a spontaneous cross-country road trip following the migrating birds, this passionate, lyrical memoir is one woman's reflections on midlife, her important personal relationships, her kaleidoscopic past, and her uncertain future. To fifty-six-year-old Anne Batterson, a woman whose life has been filled with adventure -- as a commercial pilot, an international skydiving champion, a trekking guide in Nepal -- her husband's decision to retire felt like a death sentence. Yearning for some way to reconcile herself to the future that was rapidly unfolding before her, she packed up her VW camper and hit the road with maps, bird guides, and little else except the desire to follow the fall migration and the bone-deep hunch that birds had something important to teach her. In this beautifully written narrative of that extraordinary trip, Batterson writes movingly not only about her experiences with the birds but also about the people she loves, has lost, and connects with along the way. Events from the present trigger vivid stories from the past. In the chapter "The Journey Within the Journey," a long, lonely night in a deserted campground in Virginia conjures up the ghosts of a desperate solo road trip she made when she was twenty-one. A towering cumulus cloud in Illinois brings back a breathtaking free fall into a similar cloud in "My Time as a Bird." An encounter with a great blue heron summons a compelling account of her mother's last afternoon in the world. "Bears in the Woods" describes a run-in with two Deliverance-type men in West Virginia, which brings back the murder of a dear friend in the woods of Connecticut. By the end of the journey, the ghosts of the past, like the author herself, have become part of a more fluid, more spiritual reality -- wild and spare and elegant and timeless -- one that is always out there, "quickening on the far side of reality." A unique mix of memoir and nature writing, The Black Swan is a charming story of a woman's odyssey.




Health and Safety, Environment and Quality Audits


Book Description

Internal auditing is an essential tool for managing compliance and for initiating and driving continual improvement in any organization’s systematic HSEQ performance. Health and Safety, Environment and Quality Audits includes the latest health and safety, environmental and quality management system standards—ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015, and ISO 45001:2018. It delivers a powerful and proven approach to risk- based auditing of business-critical risk areas using ISO, or your organization’s own management systems. It connects the ‘PDCA’ approach to implementing management systems with auditing by focusing on the organization’s context and the needs and expectations of its interested parties. The novel approach leads HSEQ professionals and senior and line managers alike to concentrate on the most significant risks (Big Rocks and Black Swans) to their objectives. It provides a step-by-step route through The Audit AdventureTM to provide a high-level, future-focused audit opinion. The whole approach is aligned to the international standard guidance for auditing management systems, ISO 19011:2018. With thousands of copies now sold, this unique guide to HSEQ and operations integrity auditing has become the standard work in the field over four editions, while securing bestseller status in Australasia, Europe, North America, and South Africa. It is essential reading for senior managers and auditors alike. It remains the ‘go-to’ title for those who aspire to drive a prosperous and thriving organization based on world-class HSEQ management and performance. Dr Stephen Asbury is the author of seven books on safety, risk management, and decision-making for Taylor & Francis. He is Chartered Fellow of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (CFIOSH), an Emeritus Professional of the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP), and a Fellow of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (FIEMA). He has almost 40 years’ experience fromassignments in over sixty countries on six continents.




Antifragile


Book Description

Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call “efficient” not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. Praise for Antifragile “Ambitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining.”—The Economist “A bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives.”—Newsweek