Author: Michele Wucker

Have you been hearing huge sighs of relief lately? To understand why, look to the U.S. yield curve –that is, the graph of United States Treasury securities by maturity and yield that investors watch carefully as an oracle for predicting recession—which supposedly has returned to “normal.” (Finance types: Skip this paragraph. Non-finance types: Maturity is the length of time until the principal, or amount borrowed, is due. Yield is how much investors are compensated for holding them, calculated as a bond’s interest rate –the “coupon”– divided by its price. Depending on how much the bond costs, then, the yield can be higher or lower…

Boards are paying more attention to risky business outside the office, Gray Rhino & Company CEO Michele Wucker writes in her strategy+business column November 21 “Why your CEO’s personal risk taking matters.” The recent ousters of prominent CEOs over personal missteps, whether over a questionable relationship or reckless behavior, are drawing newfound attention to a connection that boards have long overlooked: the link between social risk-seeking behaviors and the risk decisions CEOs make on the job. Obviously, companies don’t like reputational risk. But that’s not the only reason to be wary of CEOs with messy personal lives. Such lives may predict bad risk…

I stopped by my neighborhood pharmacy this morning and asked the desk pharmacist if the annual flu shot was available and if so could I get mine. “Yes,” she said. “Date of birth?” I expected that she was going to ask my name, but she started talking with the other pharmacist to check which vaccines were in stock, and directed me to the window where clients normally fill out paperwork. It would become the second of two encounters with the new economy in less than a week that gave me food for thought about the benefits of human interaction and…

In this New Conversation for Change podcast episode aired October 22, 2019, Diamond Mind host Tom Rosenak chatted with Michele Wucker about how not to get run over by a gray rhino. “We can come up of hundreds of examples of Gray Rhinos in the realm of business, politics, religion and community affairs,” Rosenak says. “Chicago politics instantly comes to mind for me. When I moved here, we joked about the “Chicago way”. The phrase “kick the can down the road” is flippantly tossed around as the pensions go unfunded, the school system decays and violence escalates. National debt, climate change,…

With a couple of shoeboxes in hand, my neighbor and friend Lynne and I walked 15 minutes to a nearby beach on a monarch butterfly rescue mission. We found dozens and dozens of monarchs stranded -many of them already dead- on the beach along Lake Michigan after waves of storms had passed through. They were a kaleidoscope of butterflies (yes, that’s actually what a group is called, though the terms flutter or swarm also are used sometimes) in the middle of a 3,000 mile journey to spend the winter in Mexico. The monarchs and our rescue mission got me thinking about…

The Business Roundtable got a lot of attention from its recent statement that the purpose of a corporation was not just to protect shareholders’ interests but also those of a much wider set of stakeholders. Nearly 200 CEOs committed to a new set of principles that include delivering value to customers, investing in employees, dealing fairly and ethically with suppliers, supporting the communities in which they work –and last, generating long-term value for shareholders. Reactions included both praise and criticism. Some naysayers claimed that the statement didn’t go far enough, citing its omission of any comment on the need to curb executive compensation.…

Those long summer days are great for reading, and as they draw to a close I wanted to share with you some of the books that I’ve enjoyed recently and liked enough to share: a fantastic geo-economic overview of Asia, and three very different books on risk. Enjoy! THE FUTURE IS ASIAN by Parag Khanna Long before I caught the Asia bug, so many of my friends who moved there over the years described their decision with these words or a very near approximation: “Asia is the future.” As I travel there more frequently, particularly to China, I finally “get” what…

What happened to all of those top-risks lists analysts made at the beginning of the year? Are the same things still keeping investors, businesses, policy makers, and citizens up at night? This Spring, I compiled and analyzed top risks and predictions for 2019 in the fourth annual “Top Gray Rhinos” meta-list. As in past years, it’s worth checking in to see if those obvious and talked about “gray rhino” risks have been handled or ignored. This year’s top risks are US-China Tensions; Economic and Financial Fragilities; Geopolitical Uncertainty; Cyber Security and Data Integrity; and Climate Change, Extreme Weather, and National…

I got a call on my cell phone yesterday that Caller ID said was one of the banks where I have an account. However, the Mr. Number app I use to screen and block spam calls identified it as “Scam Likely,” so I let it go to voicemail, as I do with any number I don’t recognize. That’s when things got scary. Usually, I don’t bother checking voicemail (who calls people without an appointment these days anyway?), but the call had me concerned, so I did check this one. I’m glad I did. The message, left in a soft voice with an…

Amanda Mull’s recent article in The Atlantic, “There Are Two Types of Airport People,” got me thinking about these two distinct species. You know, the ones who get there meticulously early and the ones who make sport of seeing just how close they can cut it. Given the amount of time I spend thinking, writing, and speaking about risk, the gap between these two types of people fascinates me. I used to be much more of a cut-it-close person until the time I decided to try taking the M60 bus from Manhattan’s Upper West Side to save a few bucks…