Chances Are
To make good choices, companies must be able to calculate and manage the attendant risks. Today, myriad sophisticated tools can help them do so. But it was only a few hundred years ago that the risk management tool kit consisted of faith, hope, and guesswork. That’s because risk is a numbers game, and before the seventeenth century, humankind’s understanding of numbers wasn’t up to the task.
A version of this article appeared in the January 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review.
