The World According to Humpty Dumpty: The New Normal of Managing Risk

Life is risk. We have known this for a long time. However, things have changed. Where we used to feel in reasonable control of the situation, risks now bombard us from many directions and at a frenetic pace. It is colored by pandemics, natural disasters, human atrocities, economic distress, geographic and political crises, and a variety of other challenges. Our education system is broken, financial institutions flip-flop between being poorly managed and reaping large profits while manipulating the system on both ends, home ownership is out of reach for many and too costly to keep for others, single-parent households are no longer the exception, and we continue to rely on fossil fuels to support our energy needs. We fret about the physical and emotional health of ourselves and our loved ones, worry that our freedoms are being compromised, fear for our public safety, lose sleep over whether we can pay the bills, and stress over the quality of our environment. And the circumstances continue to worsen.

Humpty Dumpty is a nursery rhyme dating back to the late 1800’s. It is about an egg person falling off a wall, splintering into pieces, and nobody can salvage the poor guy. The truth is that each one of us is a Humpty Dumpty, living a fragile existence fraught with threats and vulnerabilities of all kinds. While we may be perched on different walls with varying levels of peril, we all face situations that could upend us, with the possibility of falling off our wall and not being able to recover from the trauma. Not only to survive, but to thrive, we must find an approach that keeps us from falling while simultaneously enjoying the view.

Author and industry expert Mark Abkowitz provides a clear and compelling perspective and offers simple, yet powerful, advice on how to successfully maintain control over the risks that you may encounter, enabling you to leverage risk as an opportunity to embrace rather than dread over what might happen next. The World According to Humpty Dumpty will help you understand how risks are perceived and acted upon, and what it takes to re-calibrate your focus on what truly matters. Special attention is devoted to emerging threats that are looming and which will require a proactive risk management approach to “nip them in the bud”. Abkowitz introduces easy-to-follow, actionable techniques for effectively managing your re-calibrated risk portfolio.

Remember, life is risk. But if we do the right things, we no longer need to be driven by fear. The reward, peace of mind, is well worth the effort.