Why Can't You Just Give Me The Number? An Executive's Guide to Using Probabilistic Thinking to Manage Risk and to Make Better Decisions

Subtitle: An Executive's Guide to Using Probabilistic Thinking to Manage Risk and to Make Better Decisions. Patrick Leach draws on his extensive consulting and teaching experience to present a compelling, insightful, and understandable case for using probabilistic analysis as part of every day business decision-making. Practical examples and case studies are clearly presented.

Patrick Leach is a Senior Consultant with Decision Strategies Inc. Previously, he worked for Texaco as a geophysicist, partner & government coordinator, and portfolio manager. He won Best Paper awards at the Indonesian Petroleum Society conference in Jakarta in 1990 and at the Petroleum Geology of Northwest Europe conference in London in 1997. One of the more interesting periods of his career was serving as in-house evangelist for probabilistic methods at Texaco. During this time, he traveled around the world, visiting the upstream business offices, teaching workshops in stochastic methods, helping project teams apply probabilistic analysis, and training local experts. He also came to realize the need to educate the company s senior management in how to interpret the results of the analyses and how to incorporate this type of logic into their decision making and everyday thought processes.