Political Risk Quotes

“The Nine-Dot Exercise Instructions: Without lifting your pencil from the paper, draw no more than four straight lines that cross through all nine dots.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“We all know we should exercise regularly, sleep well, and eat fruits and leafy green vegetables instead of fried and processed foods. But few of us actually do these things.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Pakistan and India, both nuclear powers, appeared on the brink of war.51 The NSC called on the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency to assess the likelihood. Looking at the exact same events unfolding on the ground, the Pentagon and the CIA offered different answers.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Statistically speaking, 99.9 percent safe and 1-in-1,000 risk of death are exactly the same. But 99.9 percent safe sure sounds a lot better than having a 1-in-1,000 chance of instant death.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Black swans are consequential events for which the underlying probability distribution is simply not known, or at least not known with any degree of certainty or reliability. In Taleb’s words, “Nothing in the past can convincingly point to [a black swan’s] possibility.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Risk always has two components: the likelihood that an event will transpire and the expected impact if it does.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Terrorism is also not nearly as geographically isolated as you might think from following the news. According to the global terrorism database, in 2014 terrorists waged more than sixteen thousand attacks worldwide.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“People tend to expect that their investments will perform better than average;26 that good future events will happen more to themselves than to others;27 that their favorite sports team has a higher chance of winning than it actually does;28 and that their preferred presidential candidate will win an election even when the polls suggest otherwise.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with the issue of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations. Participants were then asked which was more probable: (1) Linda is a bank teller; or (2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.22”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“availability heuristic.” The idea is that people tend to judge the frequency of an event based on how many similar instances they can readily recall. Horrifying events that stick in one’s mind are easier to remember than mundane ones. That’s why people fear airplane crashes more than automobile accidents and Ebola more than influenza—even though airplanes are estimated to be seventy times safer than cars; and the worst Ebola outbreak killed about eleven thousand people worldwide from 2014 to 2016, while influenza, the common flu, killed between half a million and a million people during the same period.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Humans are terrible when it comes to probabilities. Americans are far more afraid of dying in a shark attack than in a car accident, even though fatal car crashes are about sixty thousand times more likely.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“But nativism, populism, protectionism, and isolationism are making a comeback. Globalization lifted millions of people out of poverty and benefited millions of others through macroeconomic growth. Still, there were losers”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Several years ago, in conversations with CEOs in almost every industry, China was the hot topic—the place to be and the future for growth and investment. Today, there is greater caution about the People’s Republic of China. In part, this is due to a growth of economic nationalism and continuing problems in the protection of foreign intellectual property.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“The Arab Spring of 2011 revealed just how transformative communications technology can be in powering collective action. The protest movements that swept the Middle East and North Africa and led to the downfall of the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes all started with a rural Tunisian fruit seller named Mohammed Bouazizi.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“The spread of social media, cell phones, and the Internet has empowered small groups in big ways. Already, 48 percent of the world is online. There are more cell phones on the earth than humans.29 By 2020, more people in the world are expected to have mobile phones than running water or electricity.30”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Perhaps the most important thing to remember about supply chain vulnerability to political actions is cumulative risk: The risk of disruption in any one node of a supply chain may be low, but the cumulative risk of disruption across the entire supply chain is much higher.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Any company that relies on information and communications technology—and nearly all companies do—is inherently vulnerable. Exposure is global: Any device that is “smart,” any phone or computer or printer or machine that is connected to the Internet (and even some that aren’t),93 can be used as an attack vector into your company’s networks. From anywhere.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“The United States fends off millions of attempted cyber intrusions into military and other government networks each month.86 In 2015, hackers most likely acting at the behest of the Chinese government stole the highly classified security clearance information of twenty-two million Americans from the Office of Personnel Management.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“All terrorists deliberately target innocents. And all terrorists seek to instill fear, terrorizing societies and their leaders. There is a strong psychological component to terrorism, which is why terrorists often strike victims and targets that have symbolic significance”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“When public officials have discretionary power over the distribution of private-sector benefits or costs, the opportunities for corruption are high.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“The World Bank broadly defines corruption as “the abuse of public office for private gain.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Most countries have gone bankrupt at least a couple of times.”36 Countries defaulting on their national debt since 1995 include Russia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Argentina, Paraguay, Grenada, Cameroon, Ecuador, and Greece.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“businesses needed to think of policies, laws, and regulations along a continuum. At one end of that continuum are those that are almost always changing in some way, like taxes, and that typically result in incremental, manageable effects for global businesses.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“In June 2017, for example, a cyber attack called “NotPetya” disabled computer systems worldwide. The ransomware attacks disrupted everything from radiation monitoring at the Chernobyl nuclear site to shipping operations in India, and its victims ranged from Russian oil company Rosneft to American pharmaceutical giant Merck.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Companies that best anticipate and manage political risks will have the strongest competitive edge. The four-part framework we provide is simple yet powerful:”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Markets are created, molded, and constrained by rules, norms, and institutions in the political sphere.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Twenty-first-century political risk is the probability that a political action could significantly affect a company’s business.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“twenty-first-century political risk, where the political actions of small groups, or even lone individuals, supercharged by connective technologies, can dramatically impact businesses of all kinds.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“When people observe a successful outcome, their natural tendency is to assume that the process that led to it was fundamentally sound, even when it demonstrably wasn’t.” —Catherine Tinsley, Robin Dillon,”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“humans are terrible when it comes to statistics and calculating risk. People are more worried about dying in an airplane crash than a car crash even though airplanes are about seventy times safer than cars. All of us suffer from the “availability heuristic,” believing that bad events which can be recalled easily (usually because of press coverage) are more likely to occur than they actually are.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity