Author: Michele Wucker

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.”

Korea’s Economic Review writes about the new Korean edition of The Gray Rhino: “Already we are seeing some of the world’s leading companies, such as Nokia and Yahoo, stepping on the gray rhino… Overall very interesting.” Click here for the full text (in Korean but translatable using online tools).

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…

Following Gray Rhino & Company founder Michele Wucker’s recent visit to London, Airmic, the association for risk managers and insurance professionals, posted this interview about applying gray rhino thinking to risk management. Jessica Titherington and Michele talked about why individuals and businesses choose to neglect significant threats and what we can do about it. Read the full article HERE.

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…

Karin Bauer at the leading Austrian newspaper, Der Standard, interviewed Michele Wucker about THE GRAY RHINO during Michele’s recent visit to Vienna. Read the interview HERE. (Click the “more” button at the end of the article to translate into English; or use your browser’s translate function.)

Elton Sayward reviews THE GRAY RHINO in the December 26, 2016 issue of BusinessWorld, calling it “a must read for the C-Level suite, start-ups and anyone that has been trampled by a gray rhino.” He applies the framework to his own memories in military situations: “As a US Naval Officer, I saw this first hand on the bridge of ships as officers would delay making a course correction in an obvious close crossing situation with another ship. Officers would have the data at hand from 2-3 different radar sources as well as visually from lookouts, but hesitated to make the call to…