Author: Michele Wucker

In the June 2021 issue of Crisis Response Journal, Emily Hough speaks with Michele Wucker about her new book, You Are what You Risk: The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World, and discovers that the key to better risk literacy lies in trust, agency and understanding your own relationship with risk. “You are what you risk firmly embraces the strengths that come from transcending traditional boundaries andbrings together research in anthropology, journalism, strategy, policy, behavioural psychology, organisationaldynamics, policy, sociology, organisational typology and behavioural economics, with a sprinkling of theology and etymology. And of course, economics underpins the…

The impact of the pandemic on risk choices is particularly important when it comes to the future of work –both the immediate issue of workplace safety as people start returning to their offices and longer-term changes in the kinds of jobs people are going to do.

AudioFile Magazine has recognized the audiobook edition of YOU ARE WHAT YOU RISK, narrated by Tavia Gilbert, with a covered Earphones Award. “This enlightening lesson is full of insights and strategies for seeing the risks we take more clearly,” the magazine wrote. Read the full review HERE.

we need to talk about the way that current U.S. tax policies treat risks by subsidizing dangerous risk-taking while failing to invest in heading off others.

Join the Earth Institute’s Andy Revkin, who’s covered global environmental risks since the 1980s, and two special guests in a Sustain What discussion of personal and collective paths toward progress in turbulent times on a human-heated planed still wrapped in a pandemic. Watch the video episode, which first aired April 19, 2021, below: Guests:- Bestselling author Michele Wucker, whose new book, “You Are What You Risk – The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World,” lays out strategies for understanding one’s own risk reflexes to maximize opportunity amid uncertainty. Kimberly Nicholas, a professor of sustainability science who has…

The Milwaukee-based Porchlight Books has named YOU ARE WHAT YOU RISK: The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World an Editor’s Choice selection. “I remember reading Wucker’s book The Gray Rhino in early 2016 and thinking, “there is something different here.” She is from Wisconsin, and there was something about her voice that felt familiar, but her book didn’t fit neatly into any category. It was a topic that traversed the globe but was intensely personal at the same time. If I could describe the topic of that book in one word, it would be reality,” Dylan Schleicher writes in his Editor’s Choice review of YOU ARE WHAT YOU RISK for Porchlight Books. “Beyond understanding risk on a…

“There are three big, global threats that keep Michele Wucker, a risk expert, up at night: Inequality, financial fragility (that is, the chance of another economic meltdown), and the climate crisis. And all of these are connected, she says,” Kate Yoder writes in Grist. The April 9, 2021 article, ” ‘The world is getting scarier’: How climate change multiplies risk,” profiles Gray Rhino & Company founder and CEO Michele Wucker and gives highlights of her new book, YOU ARE WHAT YOU RISK: The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World. “The book doesn’t fit easily in any category:…

Each one of us has a risk personality that is as distinct as a fingerprint. Our risk fingerprints start with our underlying personality traits, which you might think of as the ridges, arches, loops, and whorls that give the fingerprint structure and make it distinctive. Our experiences alter the fingerprint much as a cut might leave a scar. Just as a real fingerprint offers forensic analysts clues to identity, the risk fingerprint offers a window into who each of us is: how we feel about authority and power, about our sense of human agency, how we relate to each other in groups, and broader cultural differences that can make societies particularly risk sensitive or risk blind. It sheds light on what people hope and fear—and why—and how much power they feel they and their leaders have over the world around them.

In the wake of medication and personal protective equipment shortages in 2020 and the Texas winter weather energy debacle in early 2021, Charley Grant of The Wall Street Journal quoted Michele Wucker in the article “Losing Dollars by Pinching Pennies: When Short-Termism Goes Bad,” published March 20, 2021. The article looked at the costs of corporate failures to adequately prepare for preventable surprises. READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE [paywall].

As thrilling as it is to see a new book being “born” it’s also a bit terrifying for authors to release our ideas into the world. Will people “get” what we’re talking about? Will they disagree? Will they find an error that went uncaught? Worst of all, will they decide not to pay attention at all? It’s risky to invite readers to embrace and adapt an idea, because they sometimes mean it in ways we’d prefer them not to.