Author: Michele Wucker

The deep freeze that has held Texas in its grip this week brought back memories –definitely not “warm” ones—of the ice storm that caused blackouts and brownouts in Houston in December 1989. At the time, I was living in the Dominican Republic, where “unreliable” would have been generous at best in describing the power supply. Multiple, hours-long daily blackouts were the norm. If the power came back everyone dropped everything else in order to do whatever required electricity. That winter, I was so excited to spend the holidays in Texas visiting my family and my friends at Rice University, from…

OODA LLC Co-founder Matt Devost interviewed Michele Wucker on OODACast about Identifying and Confronting the Obvious Risks of Gray Rhinos broadcast February 1, 2021.

At the risk of gross understatement: What a year 2020 has been. Yet there is hope for 2021. The argument for systemic change is as strong as it has been in recent years. And 2020 could have been even worse.

Hugo Alconada Mon interviewed Michele Wucker in La Nación (Argentina) in an article entitled “Coronavirus. Michele Wucker: “El Covid-19 fue como una bestia inminente, a la carga y enojada” and published November 18, 2020. The interview covered the pandemic, gray rhino theory, the gray rhinos the pandemic has stirred up, leadership, and a bonus: books and binge-watching recommendations.

Michele Wucker spoke about “Learning to Navigate an Uncertain World” at Experiencia IDEA Management 2020 in Buenos Aires virtually November 18, 2020. Laura Gé, Senior Advisor to Grupo Sancor Seguros and titular Director of Banco Santander Argentina, led the conversation. https://youtu.be/mJKk-14WnL0 Martina Lombardini wrote about the event for La Nación, “El rol de los líderes, entre la pandemia y las recurrentes crisis argentinas.”

The Economist invited Michele Wucker to contribute to its annual The World Ahead/The World in 2021 issue. The resulting article, Was the pandemic a gray rhino or a black swan?, was published November 17, 2020. “Facing the daunting challenges ahead will require long-term thinking, a greater emphasis on the real economy rather than stockmarket performance and, above all, a commitment to hold ourselves and our leaders accountable,” she wrote. The article puts into context the gray rhinos ahead of us in 2021: climate change, financial fragilities, and inequality that has made the rich even richer while front-line essential workers struggle.…

My paternal great-grandfather, Josef Franz Bílek, died on November 13, 1918, in the second wave of the Great Flu Pandemic. Born in the town of Nemeski Brod in Bohemia, now called Havlíčkův Brod in the Czech Republic, he worked in restaurants in Vienna, Hamburg, and New York City’s Belmont Hotel. Eventually, like many immigrants from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he moved to Chicago, where he became a chef in downtown hotels. While working at The Congress Hotel, which still stands on Michigan Avenue, he met my great-grandmother, Frances, who was from Gliwice in what is now southern Poland. They…

Spoiler alert: My summer book list is not exactly beach reading. After all, Chicago beaches are closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Plus, I confess to taking a bit of poetic license with the description of this list since I read some of these before summer started. But who’s counting? The important thing is that these four books hold key insights into what’s going on today with political and economic tensions, what got us here, how the pandemic and our reactions to it might shape the future, and how to face with alacrity the challenges the world throws at us.…

I was on a Zoom call about Chicago’s economic recovery at 3:43 pm yesterday afternoon when my cell phone buzzed with an emergency alert from the city: Tornado warning til 4:30 pm Central Time. Having grown up in Missouri, Wisconsin, and Texas, I remember having spent many hours in the basement (or in the middle hallway in Texas, where few homes had basements because the limestone underground made digging too expensive) when I was young sitting out tornado watches and warnings with a flashlight and radio waiting for the all-clear. Earlier I had moved the plants on my deck to…

Through the end of July 2020 only, the Kindle/ebook edition of THE GRAY RHINO is on sale for $2.99 across all digital platforms. Don’t miss this chance to get your copy of the #1 best seller in financial risk management –and even better, gift it to friends and colleagues!