Michele Wucker's Blog, page 6
May 4, 2017
THE GRAY RHINO Taiwan edition
THE GRAY RHINO is now available in Taiwan via Commonwealth Books.
Zhang Bo Song reviewed the book on Inside: “One of the hottest topics of the year is the Grey Rhino. If you don’t understand what the gray rhino is and what’s the difference with a black swan, be sure to take a look at this book. Because you don’t want to wait until the grey rhino is charging at you: you want to act.”
Economic Daily: Don’t Turn a Blind Eye to a Gray Rhinoceros Crisis April 17, 2017
Tai Zhong, DWNews Taiwan “Gray Rhinoceros Phenomenon and Taiwan government” April 26, 2017 “In April 2017, the financial book “The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore” caused the attention of Taiwan’s people, Then “gray rhinoceros” following the “black swan,” became a common word on the media.”
March 4, 2017
Korea and China editions of THE GRAY RHINO
THE GRAY RHINO: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore is now available in China via Citic Publishing Group and Korea via Business Books and Co.
Read more at these links (you may need to use your browser’s translate option.)
Review in Korea Economic Daily
Maeil Business Newspaper -Cover Story
Rednet coverage of THE GRAY RHINO
THE GRAY RHINO was published in Hungary in Fall 2016 via Athenaeum, and Taiwan and Norway editions are in production.
January 12, 2017
Introducing www.thegrayrhino.com
The launch of my latest book, THE GRAY RHINO: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore (St Martin’s Press), kept me very busy in 2016, with appearances in New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Phoenix, London, Luxembourg, and Oslo.
I’ve also been working on turning the concept and framework introduced in the book into keynote speeches, workshops, and practical tools for companies, policy makers, and individuals to use in making better decisions that will help them avoid preventable but too often overlooked “gray rhino” problems.
It’s very, very exciting to formally launch Gray Rhino & Company through its very own brand new website, thegrayrhino.com. The site includes blogs about geopolitical gray rhinos as well as behavioral tools to help with gray rhinos at work or home. Along with my own thoughts, the site hosts guest commentary. It also has multimedia resources, including video, audio, slides, and e-books.
Please visit the site, take a look around, and let me know what you love (or hate!). I’m open to suggestions, to guest posts, and collaboration opportunities.
You’re also invited to sign up for my newsletter, the Gray Rhino Tracker. Every month, I’ll share insights and tips designed to help you to make sure you’re not about to get run over by a gray rhino. Plus you’ll get special offers, links to articles, and recommendations of work by people I respect.
But wait, there’s more! (I always wanted to say that…) Gray Rhino Tracker subscribers also get a FREE e-book companion, What’s Your Gray Rhino? 5 Questions to Keep You from Getting Trampled, with a simple set of questions to help you keep track of your organization’s -or your own- gray rhinos. Sign up for the Gray Rhino Tracker to get a download link.
I’ll still post content here regularly, including things related to Why the Cocks Fight and Lockout, but you can take a much deeper dive into gray rhino thinking on the new site. Thanks for taking a look!
January 1, 2017
Profile in Der Standard (Austria)
Karin Bauer at the leading Austrian newspaper, Der Standard,
interviewed Michele Wucker about THE GRAY RHINO during Michele’s recent visit to Vienna. You can read the interview HERE (click the “more” button at the end of the article to translate into English; or use your browser’s translate function)
BusinessWorld Review: Stay Alert, Act In Time
Elton Sayward reviews THE GRAY RHINO in the December 26, 2016 issue of BusinessWorld, calling it “a must read for the C-Level suite, start-ups and anyone that has been trampled by a gray rhino.”
He applies the framework to his own memories in military situations: “As a US Naval Officer, I saw this first hand on the bridge of ships as officers would delay making a course correction in an obvious close crossing situation with another ship. Officers would have the data at hand from 2-3 different radar sources as well as visually from lookouts, but hesitated to make the call to the Captain to recommend a course change. The fear of looking foolish, making a wrong recommendation, not having the correct information would all play on the officer’s better judgement to take action. This invariably would end up with the officer looking reckless and the Captain coming to the bridge and making the needed course changes in a more complex and urgent situation.”
October 19, 2016
Take the Gray Rhino Readiness Quiz
Take the Gray Rhino Readiness Quiz and share with your networks for a chance to win an autographed copy of THE GRAY RHINO: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore.
Click BEGIN THE QUIZ below to get started.
October 18, 2016
The Gray Rhino Hungarian edition
THE GRAY RHINO is now available in Hungarian translation via Athenaeum as A szürke rinocérosz: Hogyan ismerjük fel a világunkat fenyeget? nyilvánvaló veszélyeket, és hogyan szálljunk szembe velük
Click the book cover for more information in Hungarian.
October 6, 2016
HuffPost: A Creative Outpour Inspired by a Massacre
Author Julia Alvarez at the first Border of Lights vigil. Photo © 2012 by Tony Savino.
As Haiti and the Dominican Republic clean up from the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew, this week commemorates another tragedy: the Parsley Massacre, an ethnic cleansing in early October 1937 on the border of the two islands sharing the island of Hispaniola.
In my first book, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola, I wrote about how Dominican soldiers are said to have asked people on the border to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley; if they had trouble trilling the “r,” they were killed.
Rita Dove’s poem, entitled Parsley in reference to that story, powerfully evokes the massacre.
The tragedy has produced other powerful works of literature, film, and creativity.
Farming of Bones is the Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat’s novel of star-crossed lovers set against the backdrop of the massacre.
More recently, the Dominican-American poet and novelist Julia Alvarez published A Wedding in Haiti, a memoir of her friendship with a young Haitian man named Piti.
I met Julia in 1999 after my publisher sent her an advance copy of Why the Cocks Fight. She sent me a lovely note with a hand-made card with a photograph of a cockfight on the front, beginning a long friendship between two authors who hold a certain island dear in their hearts.
A few years later, Julia and talked over lunch about how sad it was that there had been no “truth commission” or other formal recognition of the victims and survivors of the massacre. We talked about how wonderful it would be to hold a candlelight vigil at the border in their honor. This was before the Internet could bring people together the way it does today, and life (as it has a habit of doing) got in the way of turning the idea into reality.
But in 2011, after the death far too soon of the Dominican-Haitian activist Sonia Pierre, a group of young Dominican- and Haitian-Americans approached us about reviving the idea of a border vigil to both honor Sonia’s memory and memorialize the massacre.
Thus was born Border of Lights, an arts collective driven by rising new voices from the diaspora, that launched in 2012 in the weeks leading up to the 75th anniversary of the massacre. Border of Lights convened performances ofmonologues from the perspectives of victims, survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders, and collected personal narratives that are still hosted on its website.
Border of Lights will hold a Global Vigil this Saturday, October 8, from 8-10pm Eastern Time, with a real time Facebook Q&A about the historical legacy and the way it has played into today’s issues. Border of Lights invites friends around the world to post photos of themselves with candles or other lights to its Facebookand Twitter accounts with the hashtag #BeLights.
From October 7-9, Border of Lights volunteers and partners will hold a vigil on the actual border and clean up after the storm. They also will screen a new film, Death by a Thousand Cuts, a powerful tale of how border tensions play out in a life and death drama over deforestation and the illicit charcoal trade from the Dominican Republic to Haiti. The film premiered at Toronto’s Hot Docs Film Festival in May.
The annual vigil, which celebrates the positive elements of the two countries’ relationship, continues even after tensions rose to new heights after a 2013 Dominican high court decision revoking the citizenship of many Dominicans of Haitian descent, and the exodus that followed after the government began enforcing it in 2015. The Dominican government revoked an award it had given to Dominican-American author Junot Diaz because he, like many other writers, artists, and scholars, had spoken out against its harsh policies.
The massacre and its modern-day legacy also have informed scholarship on the fraught relationship between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
In The Tears of Hispaniola: Haitian and Dominican Diaspora Memory, the Cuban-American scholar Lucia Suarez shows how the writing of diaspora Dominicans and Haitians has shed new light on both the past and present tensions. She ties their work to the historical record by drawing as well on texts like human rights reports.
Two new books published in 2016 by a new generation of Dominican-American scholars add new insights to the long-running issues of race, nationalism, and violence.
Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction, by the Harvard scholar Lorgia Garcia Pena, comes out in November.
Edward Paulino, a historian at John Jay College and a co-founder of Border of Lights, published Dividing Hispaniola: The Dominican Republic’s Border Campaign against Haiti, 1930-1961 in January.
Together, these works serve to recognize the memory of the victims and survivors of the massacre, and to work toward the hope that such an atrocity is never repeated. At a time when racist and nationalist speech is enjoying a resurgence around the world, this creative outpouring is more important than ever -both on the island of Hispaniola and everywhere that hatred raises its ugly head.
September 22, 2016
Special Offer For Educators
Are you teaching THE GRAY RHINO, LOCKOUT, or WHY THE COCKS FIGHT as required reading in your high school or university course? Would you like a free 20 to 30 minute Q&A session with your students over Skype?
If so, please send a copy of your course syllabus to michele@wucker.com, along with the time and day of the week that your class meets and a few suggested days, the number of students in your class, and any other information that might be helpful. Your class must read the book ahead of the session and have prepared questions.
I’ll do my best to accommodate your top preferred dates around my other commitments and travel schedule, so the more flexible you can be, the more likely we’ll be able to find a time that works.
September 5, 2016
LinkedIn Editor’s Pick: From Black Swans to Gray Rhinos
September 2, 2016
The European Union has known since the creation of the euro that the currency was bound for trouble if did not create workable ways to adjust for the wide differences among its national economies. Yet well into its second decade, its failure to do so threatens the currency’s future. The deadly defects in ignition switches and airbags at General Motors and Takata, and the emissions test fixing at Volkswagen were hardly a secret inside the companies, which covered them up instead of correcting them. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change caused by human activity, temperatures keep rising, with this July marking the hottest month ever recorded.
The reasons are different in each case, but the pattern is the same: humans consistently fail to respond to looming dangers, at astronomical costs in lives, money, reputation, and lost opportunities. Once you start looking at how many crises began with clear but essentially ignored warning signals, it becomes strikingly clear how often we miss opportunities to head off predictable problems.
Too many people take for granted that we cannot react in time to change the course of the disasters even when they are right in front of us. It’s well past time to challenge this assumption.
