The Leader’s Guide to Managing Risk

A Proven Method to Build Resilience and Reliability

Published by HarperCollins Leadership

Order Your Copy Today

AMAZON

The Leader’s Guide to Managing Risk offers practical guidance to any business or organization. The book provides a clear lens to see and understand risks in the business environment, as well as our everyday lives. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
Steve Predmore, Executive Vice President & Chief Safety Officer at Amtrak

Listen to the audiobook Introduction (unabridged)

Listen to the audiobook Prologue (unabridged)

There’s a pattern to how bad things unfold and a sequence to preventing them

Risk versus opportunity. It’s the equation every business leader must balance. The problem is we can manage only what we see and understand – while most of the risk lies below the surface, beyond the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The risk that lies ahead isn’t being reported by your employees. It’s not on the radar of your regulators. It’s hidden in your successful outcomes, producing positive results until it’s too late. Counterintuitively, most businesses don’t fail because they aren’t good at what they do. It’s because they didn’t pay attention to what they don’t know how to do.

See, Understand, and Manage Risk in Sequence

In his new book, The Leader’s Guide to Managing Risk: A Proven Method to Build Resilience and Reliability, K. Scott Griffith illuminates the secret to this success. He guides you on the journey of his professional life leading to the development of the world’s first high-reliability standard to be independently audited by a global auditing organization. After witnessing a plane crash in 1985, he joined a team of physicists designing the first airborne LiDAR wind shear prediction system and helped NASA and the FAA develop pilot avoidance and recovery strategies. This experience led him to become an airline industry leader who developed a program that led to a 95% reduction in the US fatal accident rate, which led to an invitation by the Surgeon General to assist healthcare improvement over the next two decades.

Throughout the book, Griffith guides the reader through his journey of discovery while weaving personal stories showing how to improve our everyday lives and businesses. With equal parts economics, engineering and behavioral science, and the ethical underpinnings of our justice systems, he explores how the pattern in the chaos of the world around us can be tamed by the Sequence of Reliability.

What People Are Saying …

Griffith has captured lightning in a bottle. The Leaders Guide to Managing Risk capitalizes on complex knowledge of systems in combination with relatable, reality-based anecdotes to distill information into a can’t-put-down, engaging read. All leaders should read this book and begin implementing its strategies to maximize the potential of their organization.

Laura C. Fulginiti, PhD, D-ABFA, Past-President, American Academy of Forensic Sciences

If you are a leader trying to build reliability and resilience into an organization, read this book before you unleash a horde of organizational consultants on your team. This is the first book that explains the science of making those pieces fit together. You will find that the sequence really does matter.

William R. Voss, Senior Executive, FAA and ICAO, and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation (retired)

Edwards Deming once said, “It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, then do your best.” This book shows you what to do, picking up where the quality management movement leaves off and the journey to high reliability begins.

Lisa Ramthun, RN, MSN, CPHRM, FASHRM, CPHQ, Enterprise Vice President Risk & Claims, Jefferson Health

Griffith provides an accessible, thorough, and clear path to address real-world risks that can save lives, reduce injuries, and prevent crashes by addressing these known risks. He offers practical, science-based, and operationally-tested strategies and tactics that can enhance safety now across many real-world environments and shape a safer future in our rapidly evolving world.

Mark R. Rosekind, Ph.D., former National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) Administrator, NTSB Member, and NASA scientist

Griffith is a pioneer to whom we turn for advice. Now, with this book, he has provided an imminently readable roadmap for taking the important step of hard-wiring reliability into our organizations.

Diane C Pinakiewicz, Founding Board Member and Former President, National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF)

The Leader’s Guide to Managing Risk is a must-read for all leaders, no matter what type of organization you are leading. It is filled with impactful stories, personal anecdotes, and important facts, and figures that combine to make it easy to understand the key concepts around how to see, understand, and manage risk.

LeAnn Swanson, CEO, National Center for Healthcare Leadership

When did you last learn something so novel, so brilliant, and so helpful that you could hardly wait to share it with others? The Leader’s Guide to Managing Risk is a book that has given me new eyes, providing clarity to a pattern for understanding and seeing things that now seem so obvious.

David Boyce, Manager of Human Performance Improvement at Battelle Energy Alliance/Idaho National Laboratories

About the Author

K. Scott Griffith is the founder and managing partner of SG Collaborative Solutions, LLC. He is the originator of the world’s first organizational high reliability and just culture standard independently audited and certified by a world-leading international accreditation organization. He is an author, speaker, consultant, physicist, captain, and former airline executive.

Widely known as the father of the Aviation Safety Action Program which led to a 95% reduction in the US fatal accident rate, his work has made high consequence industries more reliable across the globe.

In The Leader’s Guide to Managing Risk, he brings the secrets of his success to any business, organization, or individual striving for sustainable results.

Career Blind Spots

After Cruise Ban, What’s Next For Autonomous Vehicles?

Get Your Flu Shot. Seriously.

Forbes Article: 3 Must-Have Strategies to Risk Proof Your Career