Customer Reviews

Risk Assessment and Decision Making in Business and Industry: A Practical Guide

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great book for someone who is starting to practice Risk Assessment, either as a consultant, or internally. It covers the practical aspects of risk assessment studies which are usually overlooked, such as working and communicating with stakeholders. The 'softer' side of risk assessment theory is covered i.e. what does all this mean in plain english - how do you communicate the results etc.

The author has a good style, and the text does not contain the usual fluff and buzzwords often found in business-oriented books. Check it out!

This was an interesting book to read due to its offering of some alternative ways to look at risk assessment. The fresh approach was enjoyable, as was the emphasis on making risk assessment practical and something that's done over time, not just at the beginning of a venture or project.

The layout of the book was split into two major divisions in my mind. The first half seems to be most focused on how to be a trainer or risk assessment expert. It offers guidance on how to make risk assessment a part of an organization's process and how to increase acceptance of these techniques. The second half focused more on the technical background for risk assessment, including a discussion of probability distributions for modeling uncertainty and then a number of examples (including computer code presumably used in the author's risk software). The second half of the book was much more technical than the first half, which seemed a little unusual to me.

One thing I wasn't too sure about in the book was its characterization of different risk types. The author argued against all the technical names for distributions, but then proposed a variety of distributions that were simply renamed versions of these distributions. Frankly, I found the names to be silly and of no value except for the novelty factor. Further, in discussing the distributions, the charts to go with each distribution are outputs of distribution sampling, rather than raw distributions. This struck me as odd and seemed to be much less useful than it could have been. (An example is the uniform distribution which should represent an equal probability of all values within the range; the figure in the book doesn't show a uniform probability for each value.)

This is a good managerial-type book for risk assessment. It's a worthwhile read and addition to a practitioner's or academic's library. It lacks basics on statistics and risk assessment and really needs to be accompanied by a traditional risk-related book to be most useful.

I give the book 4 stars because it's a good book but has a number of quirks discussed above that detract from the content and made me scratch my head.

This book does an excellent job of laying out the basic of risk assessment, including all of the non-mathematical aspects, such as office politics and educating others in the use of risk models. It's easy to understand, even if you don't have a strong math background. I'm an English major, so I should know!

If you want to read two tons of wording and come away with a pound of information then this book is for you. Most of what he says is intuitive. I am in the process of working with and developing a risk assessment format for some new products. I have picked this book up a couple of times,(giving it a second chance)but end up just putting it back on the shelf because it is "empty". I like books that are practical.