Michele Wucker talks with the FT’s Matt Klein about why we don’t deal with problems we see in advance – and how to fix it- on the January 18, 2018 edition of FT Alphachat, the conversational podcast about business and economics produced by the Financial Times in New York. Each week, FT hosts and guests delve into a new theme, with more wonkiness, humour and irreverence than you’ll find anywhere else. LISTEN HERE.
After Chinese President Xi Jinping’s annual New Year’s address, it has become an annual tradition for Chinese media to scour his bookshelf for new titles. In 2018, the new books include The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore, which was released in China in February 2017. Other new economics books include textbooks on ecological economics, W.W. Rostow’s 1960 classic The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, and Money Changes Everything by William N Goetzmann. The bookshelf also included texts on understanding artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and machine learning, including The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos and Augmented by Brett King. Very good company! Read the whole list here in Shanghaiist or, if your Chinese (or your browser translator) is good, a longer article on qq.
Michele Wucker published on the strategy + business blog on November 16, 2018. Imagine that your company is kicking off two projects. The first one entails the assumption of big risks, but it will pay off in a major way for the company if it succeeds. You need to pick one of your team members to run it, someone who manages risk well while under stress. The second project is considerably lower profile, and its manager will need to be someone who can operate autonomously in a situation where no level of risk is tolerable. Your top two lieutenants are a man and a woman. Whom do you pick to run which project? If you use old gender stereotypes about risk aversion and risk tolerance to inform your decision, you’ll likely make a big mistake. Leaders who seek guidance in the old Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus paradigm will quickly lose their way, because when it comes to risk and gender, the relevant celestial orbs are Uranus and Neptune: two planets that are nearly the same size. Indeed, as Julie Nelson, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, notes in her book, Gender and Risk-Taking: Economics, Evidence, and Why the Answer Matters, 95 percent of the risk preferences of men and women overlap. READ MORE HERE
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