Author: The Gray Rhino

Anne Janzer is an award-winning author, nonfiction writing coach and marketing practitioner on a mission to help people make a positive impact with their writing. She supports and encourages writers, authors and marketers through her books, blog posts, online courses, webinars, and teaching. Her book, The Writer’s Process, won a gold medal from Readers’ Favorite and a silver medal in the ForeWord INDIES Book of the Year award. The Workplace Writer’s Process, winner of the 2018 IndieReader Discovery Aware for Nonfiction, was named one of the best business writing books of all time by BookAuthority. Her book Writing to Be Understood, about effective nonfiction…

Read More

Michele Wucker wrote “Why managing uncertainty is a key leadership skill” for strategy+business, published June 10, 2020. “As it brutally disrupts life and business as we know it, COVID-19 has brought into sharp relief a crucial business skill: the ability to navigate uncertainty,” she wrote. “That means knowing what you can control and what you cannot, aligning your company and employees with a shared purpose, holding to a clear vision of where you want the company to be, and trusting your team to help get there. Today’s economy is a real-life laboratory, an environment that supports the conclusion of a…

Read More

“Unlike the black swan that appears only in hindsight, grey rhino theory is forward-looking. It is about actively seeing what’s in front of us and challenging ourselves to act,” Michele Wucker wrote in “To avoid the next pandemic, you need to know the difference between a black swan and a grey rhino,” published in The National April 23, 2020. “Instead of focusing mainly on why problems are not readily solvable, our priority needs to be on what it takes, from governments and civil society, to head off grey rhinos. The solution begins with a reset of expectations.” Read the full…

Read More

Understanding people’s tolerance for and approach to risk can help companies build teams and improve decision making, Gray Rhino & Company CEO Michele Wucker writes in her latest strategy+business column, “The new behavioral science of risk taking in business,” published October 9, 2019. There’s something of a bull market in understanding attitudes toward risk. Last decade’s financial crisis spawned a slew of platforms — Riskalyze, FinaMetrica, Tolerisk, and a rapidly growing list of competitors — that seek to understand people’s tolerance for financial risk. It is now common for financial advisors to ask clients a set of questions about how…

Read More

Why do we often neglect big problems, like the financial crisis and climate change, until it’s too late? Policy strategist Michele Wucker urges us to replace the myth of the “black swan” — that rare, unforeseeable, unavoidable catastrophe — with the reality of the “gray rhino,” the preventable danger that we choose to ignore. In this TED Talk, she shows why predictable crises catch us by surprise — and lays out some signs that there may be a charging rhino in your life right now. This talk was presented at an official TED Salon event February 1, 2019, and was…

Read More

Marketwatch reporter Anneken Tappe interviewed Gray Rhino & Company CEO Michele Wucker about the origins and use of the term “gray rhino,” after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s reference to gray rhinos helped to push down US stocks by hundreds of points. Read the article here:  5 Questions with the Woman Who Coined the Term “Gray Rhino.”

Read More

The Chinese financial news site, Netease, interviewed Gray Rhino & Company CEO Michele Wucker about the implications of US Federal Reserve policies. Here’s the interview in English: There was a view that Fed’s interest rate hike process will be reversed in December. But, finally, a tough rate hike was adopted. What is the reason? The Fed followed through with its rate hike as part of its long-term goal of trying to normalize monetary policy. Many market observers, and the Fed itself, have long worried about unintended consequences of the very loose monetary policy of the past decade. It cited a…

Read More