Category: Health Care

“For some people, risk is scary and dangerous, and means peril and loss. For others, it means risk assets and they have to pile on because they just see the upside. But risk is actually value-neutral. It is important to be aware of the bias that you bring to things. Do you see both sides and do you weigh them? Or are you likely to overweigh the downside or overweigh the upside?” ________ Michele Wucker

We all have an ambivalent attitude towards risk. In 1850, a young Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Abiah Root “the shore is safer, Abiah, but I love to buffet the sea. I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the danger!”

In her new book You Are What You Risk, author and strategist Michele Wucker codifies this ambivalence to risk. In this podcast with Sami, Michele explains the concepts of “risk fingerprint” and “personal risk portfolio”, among others.

Topics include:

• 0:00 Introduction of Michele Wucker
• 2:13 Thesis of ‘You Are What You Risk’
• 5:20 Attitude towards risk: innate vs. acquired through experience
• 10:40 Taking a risk vs. following a path; Risk and entrepreneurship
• 14:10 About each person’s risk fingerprint
• 19:45 Taking risk as the only woman in the room
• 24:40 “Risk is value-neutral”
• 33:00 Matching risk fingerprints in interactions; Measuring risk
• 38:20 The personal risk portfolio
• 42:25 Remembering the onset of the pandemic as a gray rhino

TO HEAR THE PODCAST, CLICK HERE OR ON THE TIMELINE BELOW:

(photo of Michele Wucker by Hal Shipman)