1WHAT IS RISK AND HOW IS IT MANAGED?
To open with a clean slate, we considered writing this book about “ksir”* rather than risk. Risk is a tainted term. Each of us has prior, often subconscious and unhelpful, associations with risk. Perhaps it recalls the life insurance salesperson who called during dinner last evening, or the high blood pressure reading the doctor took last year. Maybe it stems from a downturn in the economy and its implications for your job. If you are an engineer, risk may recall for you a design professor showing a film of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse.
Narrowing our focus to risk management does not help much. An Internet search on “risk management” (in quotation marks) yields over a million ...
