The Failure of Risk Management, 2nd Edition

Preface

A lot has happened in the decade since the first edition of this book, both in the world of risk management and in my own work. Since then, I've written two more editions of my first book, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business as well as writing Pulse: The New Science of Harnessing Internet Buzz to Track Threats and Opportunities and How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk. By 2017 this book (along with How to Measure Anything) was placed on the required reading list for the Society of Actuaries Exam Prep.

Regarding the broader topic of risk management, there were several more examples of risk management gone wrong since the first edition. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in Japan, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and multiple large cyberattacks that compromised hundreds of millions of personal records. But I won't dwell on these anecdotes or the events that occurred prior to the first edition. This book should be just as relevant after the next big natural disaster, major product safety recall, or catastrophic industrial accident. Better yet, I hope readers see this book as a resource they need before those events occur. Risk management that simply reacts to yesterday's news is not risk management at all.

I addressed risk in my first book, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business. Risk struck me as one of those items that is consistently perceived as an intangible ...