Book Reviews Archives

The New (Ab)normal: Reshaping Business and Supply Chain Strategy Beyond Covid-19

Having read Yossi Sheffi’s wonderful “The Resilient Enterprise” some years ago, I had high hopes for this book. Sadly it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. The book is organised in six sections and, for me, the most useful content is contained in the second (“Living with Uncertainty”) and fourth (“Supply Chains for the …

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Managing Risk in Extreme Environments, by Duncan Martin – Not a Book Review

“Managing Risk in Extreme Environments: Front-Line Business Lessons for Corporates and Financial Institutions” has been on the bookshelves in our office since it was published in 2008 but, for some reason, I have only just got around to looking through it. Given that The book is 12 years old, and I have not read it …

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Book Review – "Deciding: A Guide to Even Better Decision-Making"

I have read many books about decision-making over the years, mostly from a perspective of psychology/behavioural economics. Some have focused on the particular challenges of decision-making in a crisis; whilst others are more general in their outlook, but still generally contain useful nuggets for crisis management. I have to say that this book by Roger …

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Book Review – Crisis Proof by Jonathan Hemus

It’s always great to see a new book on crisis management, and I was particularly interested to see this one as I used to run crisis management training courses with Jonathan Hemus some years ago. One of the most common problems with books that purport to be about crisis management is that they really just …

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Book Reviews – “The Rules of Contagion” by Adam Kucharski and “The Maths of Life and Death” by Kit Yates

Published in 2020 and 2019 respectively, these books are both very timely as we have all had to get to grips with epidemiology. Whilst there are hopeful signs that we may be close to finding a way out of the current Covid-19 pandemic; the threat of future pandemics remains very real. As the name suggests …

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Book Review – The Failure of Risk Management (2nd Edition)

Reading the first edition of “The Failure of Risk Management: Why it’s Broken and how to Fix it”,by Douglas Hubbard, back in 2009 was a professional epiphany for me. Having been working in business continuity management for about five years at this stage, I was aware of the prevalence of many questionable practices in risk …

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Book Review – The Heat of the Moment by Sabrina Cohen-Hatton

I read and enjoyed Sabrina Cohen-Hatton’s “The Heat of the Moment: A Firefighter’s Stories of Life and Death Decisions” last year but neglected to blog about it at the time. It was only when listening recently to media coverage of the London Fire Brigade’s (LFB) response to the Grenfell Tower fire that I was reminded …

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"Rethinking Reputational Risk" – An Excellent New Book

I have really enjoyed this new book from Anthony Fitzsimmons and Derek Atkins, and would thoroughly recommend it to all those with an interest in risk management. The title is actually somewhat misleading, suggesting a narrow focus on reputation management; whereas the book actually takes a very broad look at a wide variety of behavioural …

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