Taking Smart Risks: How Sharp Leaders Win When Stakes are High

FOREWORD

Think for a moment about your relationship to risk. Most of us never do, in any rational, systematic, ongoing way. Instead, we instinctively avoid risk wherever we can, only to occasionally and impulsively overindulge it, usually to no good end. Risk is built into every choice we make, but few of us know how to manage it to our advantage.

Then along comes Doug Sundheim, arguing in these pages that the answer lies in something called “smart risk,”—a paradoxical notion that significantly increases our odds of success in any given endeavor, he says, and can also make our lives richer and more vital.

In the 1960s, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described the experience of “flow” as the sort of total immersion in an activity that ...