Author: Michele Wucker

How intrigued I was recently when I found that I would be speaking in Shanghai to an audience with an artificial intelligence translator.[bctt tweet=”I was intrigued to speak in Shanghai to an audience with an artificial intelligence translator. ” username=”@wucker”] The team fed a draft of my remarks to it ahead of time to “train” it. As I spoke, it interpreted my remarks and posted them on large screens behind me. Like many new forms of AI, there’s still human involvement: a real person supervised the translation program. That may have been why there was a long delay. A really,…

Gray Rhino & Company CEO Michele Wucker spoke at the 70th CFA Institute Annual Conference in Philadelphia May 21, 2017, applying the gray rhino framework to challenges facing the financial management industry. Peter M.J. Gross summarized the talk: “Is Your Gray Rhino Plan in Place?” View the Virtual Link interview (scroll to 0:51) [View the story “The Gray Rhino at #CFAEdge” on Storify] Storify by Michele Wucker Mon, Jun 05 2017 15:46:59 The Gray Rhino at #CFAEdge 70th CFA Institute Annual Conference -Sharpen Your Investment Edge CFA Challenge@ResearChallenge Do you have a plan for dealing with…

My Facebook and Twitter feeds were chock full of “Vive la France!” posts Sunday as the word circulated of centrist Emmanuel Macron’s election as the next president of France. Macron roundly defeated Marine Le Pen. Fractures within the European Union ranked as the third most important obvious but unresolved “gray rhino” threat of 2017, in my annual review of major top risks lists compiled by risk and investment experts at the beginning of the year. France’s election marks a major inflection point in the unfolding of European political -and thus economic- risk. While polls had showed Macron with a wide lead,…

THE GRAY RHINO is now available in Taiwan via Commonwealth Books. Zhang Bo Song reviewed the book on Inside: “One of the hottest topics of the year is the Grey Rhino. If you don’t understand what the gray rhino is and what’s the difference with a black swan, be sure to take a look at this book. Because you don’t want to wait until the grey rhino is charging at you: you want to act.” Economic Daily: Don’t Turn a Blind Eye to a Gray Rhinoceros Crisis April 17, 2017 Tai Zhong, DWNews Taiwan  “Gray Rhinoceros Phenomenon and Taiwan government” April 26, 2017 “In April 2017,…

THE GRAY RHINO is now available in translation in China, published by Citic Publishing Group. READ MORE on Rednet “Gray Rhino: How to Deal with the Probability Crisis”: Looking for Opportunities from Crisis Events (You may need a browser translator.) READ MORE on Sohu “Harvard MIT Microsoft hot digital transformation is a “gray rhinoceros” event” (You may need a browser translator.) UPDATE March 23: THE GRAY RHINO is a bestseller in China, already in its third printing in just over a month since its release!

What will keep investors and policy makers up at night in 2017? For the second year in a row, I’ve sorted through lists of predictions and top geo-political and geo-economic “gray rhino” risks: the highly obvious, probable threats that may or may not be getting the attention and responses they need to be averted. More often, the answer is “not.”

New year, new forecasts. A January ritual, the issuing of lists of top risks and predictions for the year ahead, is well under way. These lists make it harder to say “Nobody saw it coming.” Or at least they ought to. Never underestimate humans’ ability to turn our attention away from what’s right in front of us. The global, cross-sector scope of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, combined with its assessments of both impact and likelihood, make it the gold standard. The top right hand quadrant –highly likely, high impact– is where gray rhinos lurk. I particularly like the report’s feature analyzing the…

I want to share with you a simple tool that two people whose work I respect highly use regularly to improve decision making and head off gray rhinos: the humble Post-it Note. One of the key take-aways from THE GRAY RHINO is that we need to pay more attention to ideas from people who are less likely to speak out or be heard. Because we are biased to over-weight information that is familiar, confirms our pre-conceptions, or comes from people like us, we need to actively seek out and seriously consider alternative views if we want to avoid unpleasant but…

We all have things in our lives that we know we need to handle. But human nature is a funny thing and we get in our own way. All too often it’s the most obvious things that get us: the problems we ought not to be able to ignore in our health, finances, relationships or jobs. Instead, we push dealing with them off into the future. We know they’re there, right, and we’ll get around to it -but of course we don’t. I came up with the term “gray rhino” to describe obvious dangers that are coming right at us but that…

Wouldn’t it be nice if all of our problems stayed small and manageable? People who are good at identifying challenges and tending to them early on are my heroes. I think of them as game wardens caring for cute baby rhinos. We’re all different in the ways we respond to the probable but often overlooked, downplayed, or outright ignored problems that I call “gray rhinos”: they’re charging right at us, but we don’t always see them or react properly. Take the Gray Rhino Quiz to find out how well you deal with the obvious dangers in your life, work and in the…