Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents Are Rarely Accidental
About this ebook
Flirting with Disaster will do for catastrophe what Blink did for intuition, and The Black Swan did for probability: provide a popular audience with an engaging, in-depth view of a complex and important topic. Gerstein and Ellsberg examine the culture of institutions: why even people of good will and inside knowledge underestimate risk; feel psychologically incapable of averting tragedy and unable to pick up the pieces afterward; and don’t come forward forcefully enough to head off catastrophe. They also celebrate those who go beyond the call of duty to save others, including Dr. David Graham of the FDA who courageously stood up to reveal Vioxx’s deadly effects. One such whistleblower contributes both a foreword and an afterword: Daniel Ellsberg, renowned for releasing the Pentagon Papers.
Flirting with Disaster provides a pathway for those who want to foster truthtelling in their organization and head off disasters in the making. At once alarming, entertaining, and hopeful, it offers readers very real and practical lessons for everyday life.
About the author
Marc Gerstein holds a Masters and Ph.D. in Management from the Sloan School of Management, MIT. He has taught at Columbia Business School and Sloan. He currently heads Marc Gerstein Associates, Ltd., a management consulting firm. His writing on strategy and organizational dynamics has been published by the Sloan Management Review, the Journal of Business Strategy, and Stanford University. Michael Ellsbergis a developmental editor who did extensive work on his father Daniel Ellsberg’s bestseller Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg worked on the top secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam, later known as the Pentagon Papers. He is a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, government wrongdoing, and the need for patriotic whistleblowing.
