Présentation de l'éditeur
This seminal work reveals how age, education, income, industry, firm size, and other factors affect a manager's willingness to take risks.
Extrait
Chapter 1
Essence of Risk
A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will, is likely to be short.
Bertrand Russell
INTRODUCTION
Some risks such as natural disasters are dramatically obvious, and they affect many people. Hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes can destroy entire communities in minutes. Malaria, smallpox, and sleeping sickness can devastate populations. Other risks are more personal. Crossing busy streets, working in a polluted environment, borrowing money, or failing to contain our anger are everyday risks that most of us face.
Consider getting food from the supermarket. We jump in the car and run a risk of being hit by a careless or drunk driver, even if we are cautious ourselves. Once inside the store we are faced with goods that may have been tampered with or tomorrow may be declared carcinogenic or environmentally harmful. On a more minor level, we may discover that the meat we bought was on sale at a competing supermarket.
If everyday choices present us with a shower of risks, our major choices are immersed in a virtual downpour. Think of what can go wrong in getting married, changing jobs, or taking a trip to a foreign country. In many of these situations, our choices do not just affect us, they affect many other people. Business and government decisions can influence the risks faced by thousands or millions of others.
Risk is a pervasive part of all actions. While eventual death may be certain, every day we engage in activities -- even just crossing the road to mail a letter -- that carry a risk of death. Although death is the ultimate risk, the economic and social risks that we face can be more oppressive. Seemingly secure jobs may disappear in economic hard times. Seemingly stable marriages may shatter for many possible reasons.
Life requires choices; choices require risks. While you can choose to minimize the risks you face, you cannot avoid risks completely. Along with death and taxes, risk is one of the certainties of life.
Proust-like, we may decide to isolate ourselves in the safety of our homes to avoid risks. However, we still may fall down the stairs, have a plane crash into the roof, be electrocuted in the bath, be assaulted by a burglar, be blown away by a tornado, or be downwind of an unsafe nuclear power plant. We may move to an isolated mountain region to escape from the risks of a city's polluting factories, traffic congestion, and racial tension only to expose ourselves to the risk of inadequate emergency medical services in the event of a heart attack. That many risks are hidden and not foreseen may mean greater peace of mind, but it does not reduce our exposure to their possible negative effects.
Primitive man had little control over his environment. The daily activities of acquiring food and shelter were fraught with risk. While modern man has gained some control over his environment and may experience fewer risks in acquiring the basic necessities, a more complex environment has brought new risks. In this century, technology and collective action fill our lives with man-made hazards such as nuclear war or acid rain. Gaining control over some risks has led to different types of risks that may even be more dangerous than the ones that have been mitigated. In general, avoiding one kind of risk will introduce some other risk. By not building nuclear powered energy plants, we run risks of impairing our economic structure by running short of fuel, increasing coal-related disease, and so forth.
Some actions appear to be free of risk. We invest our life savings in a "risk-free" savings account insured by the federal government instead of buying mutual funds or we marry our childhood sweetheart whom we have known for twenty yea
