Swans, Swine, and Swindlers ─ Coping with the Growing Threat of Mega-Crises and Mega-Messes

This work for practitioners, scholars, and students in crisis management and risk management goes beyond typical traditional academic literature of crises to explain factors surrounding large-scale, man-made and man-made-worse disasters such as hurricanes, terrorist attacks, bank failures, and oil spills. A 'mess' is defined here as a complex network of problems and related conscious and unconscious assumptions, beliefs, emotions, and values that confound and perpetuate the problem. The authors define three types of interrelated causes of messes. Swans are false assumptions and mistaken beliefs that can lead to crises. (The term is taken from the 'black swans' of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book.) Swine refers to the inability to design and operate systems that can minimize human greed and arrogance. Swindlers are unethical and corrupt behaviors. The authors seek to identify patterns that all crises follow, drawing on insight and techniques from philosophy, public health and safety, psychoanalysis of organizations, and organizational health. The philosophical framework they present will help organizations overcome mega-denial and move beyond fear-based crisis management. A section on applications applies core concepts of the book to the financial sector. Alpaslan teaches in the College of Business and Economics at California State University-Northridge. Mitroff is affiliated with The Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UC Berkeley. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)