Author: Michele Wucker

In November, I wrote here about my courageous friend Mina Guli. Mina who set out on a quest to run 100 marathons in 100 consecutive days around the world to draw attention to water scarcity, which the World Economic Forum ranks among the top global societal risks in terms of impact. Mina’s journey has taken an unexpected but ultimately inspiring turn. In early January, weeks of running in pain forced Mina to downgrade her speed to walking, now taking nine to twelve hours to finish each marathon instead of four to five. She tried shuffling and using walking poles to help, but her journey…

Gray Rhino & Company CEO Michele Wucker spoke at the Netease Impact Summit in Beijing January 5, 2019, on the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the future of work. Watch and find a transcript at this link: https://3g.163.com/money/article/E4ON4CTB00259CBS.html

How has the world been doing in confronting its most obvious but unresolved risks in 2018? This was the third year that Gray Rhino & Company compiled a list of top Gray Rhino risks –a meta analysis of dozens of top risks lists– and tracked how the most obvious yet unresolved risks have evolved throughout the year. It’s time for an end-year wrap-up, which follows the trends we identified in our mid-year review over the summer. Analysts broadly agreed at the beginning of the year that the top risk was monetary policy errors. How well the world did in addressing this depends on how you…

You may have read the news that University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently took out an insurance policy to protect itself from a steep fall in Chinese student enrollment in case of a visa policy or other external shock. The university estimates that it would lose $60 million a year were it to completely lose Chinese students, who generally pay full tuition and thus help to subsidize American students. The increasingly heated rhetoric about China and the nosedive in the relationship between the two countries certainly ups the risk of a drop in Chinese student enrollment. But it’s part of a much bigger…

As George H.W. Bush is laid to rest, Americans mourn a man who – even to many of those who disagreed with him on policy – represented an era of greater civility and cooperation, and putting the greater good above one’s own interests. It’s hard to forget his famous campaign pledge, “Read my lips: no new taxes,” or the consequences of his breaking that pledge. Of course, in the autumn of 1990 he went back on his words. But if ever there was occasion to break a promise, this was one. Interest rates were rising, supply side economics were not…

The central paradox of the inexorable advance of artificial intelligence and automation is that some of the most important ways humans will add value in the future are activities that we undervalue now: social interactions, creativity, and caregiving. But how do we change the culture to be able to monetize those contributions? For centuries, compensation has been minimal to nothing for caring for children and aging parents. The recent expansion of the service economy has created many caregiver jobs, but these tend to be low paid. Our economy doesn’t reflect how important the human touch is, much less that it…

Those of you familiar with my work know how important I believe it is to make better decisions by getting a variety of voices around the table, thus avoiding groupthink and making room for important perspectives you might otherwise miss. But what if you’ve got the right minds around the table but they don’t get heard? That’s why I was so intrigued when I learned about a Kickstarter for Inclusion Meeting Cards, a project from the Chicago based software development company Table XI. The game is a simple, tangible, non-confrontational tool for reorienting discussion, using humor to defuse potentially tense interactions like telling…

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…

Washington’s devil-may-care attitude has become Beijing’s top priority Michele Wucker published this op-ed on the Financial Times beyondbrics blog November 13, 2018. In its new annual financial stability report, China’s central bank has again sounded the alarm that “grey rhino” risks — clear and present dangers that are often neglected — continue to threaten the economy. The report focused on China’s real estate market and high levels of local government, household and corporate debt, consistent with the concerns of Chinese and international observers. Indeed, a popular narrative among western analysts is that China’s debt is a likely trigger for the next financial crisis.…

For most of my career, when I’ve thought about risk it has involved specialized areas like sovereign credit risk, market risk, operational risk or political risk. But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how different “risk” in the financial sense is from the way people view risk in their day to day lives. Peter Bernstein’s book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk does a fantastic job describing the evolution of conceptions of risk throughout history. He tracks gambling from the ancient astragalus dice game played with the ankle bone of sheep or deer, through Asian card games and the more recent…