“Are you a bear, a squirrel, a turtle, or a fox?” author David X Martin asks on the cover of The Nature of Risk, a beautifully illustrated book that makes clear the different approaches people take to considering risk. Published in 2012, this is Martin’s second book on risk management. His first was Risk and the Smart Investor.
The reviews are in:
“Garrison Keillor once remarked that cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function, but David X Martin rounded up a menagerie of forest animals to ferret out the risk function. As an introduction to risk, the book should get people thinking about everyday risk around them in the same way that Spencer Johnson’s 1998 Who Moved My Cheese got its readers thinking about the impact of change on them and their careers. Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler, Albert Einstein advised. David Martin’s The Nature of Risk meets that standard.”
–Dev Strischek, The RMA Journal
“Those who wrangle daily with risk can often provide insight to the broader nature of uncertainty, peril and payoff. In the investment realm, David X Martin, a senior adviser at management consultancy Oliver Wyman, has written…The Nature of Risk, a short parable for newer investors which portrays different types of risk-takers as forest animals, showing the strengths and weaknesses of each.”
–Sue Shellenbarger, The Wall Street Journal
“Several weeks ago I read a review of David Martin’s The Nature of Risk in The RMA Journal and bought a copy. It is a brief (75 pages) Aesopian fable on the nature of risk as seen through the eyes of numerous animals: red and gray squirrels, rabbit, beaver, bear, turtle, deer, eagle, rat snake, woodpecker and a fox… Brief, simplistic, but amusing.”
–Felix Kloman, Seawrack Press