Articles on PR for People

“A Republic, If You Can Keep It”

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”


Risk Management and Mass Shootings

The risk explored here today is that of mass shootings. The question is whether we are doing all that we can to mitigate that risk – and whether, beyond some very straightforward laws that could be put in place, it is even possible to mitigate the risk. 


Enlarging Our Discourse

The column I wrote for the June 2018 issue of ASA News & Notes could easily be the column I write this month: a year ago, it covered school shootings, mass shootings, the Trump administration’s separation of children from their refuge parents, and insult with bluster as a form of diplomacy. A year later, we see not much has changed, and each of these topics makes news regularly.


America is Still a Killing Field

In October of 2017, the title of this column was “America as a Killing Field,” after the Las Vegas mass shootings. I have written little about the terrible toll that guns are taking on our society since then, and only briefly in February of 2018 following the Stoneman-Douglass school shootings.  Since that time, there is estimated to be a school shooting every 12 days.


Boeing 737MAX Issues Illuminate the Costs of Ill-Considered Risk

How we got to this point, with Boeing 737MAX airplanes grounded all around the world, has been written about extensively. Here I should like to analyze the situation using an operational risk lens to look at the types of risk at this point in what is still a very dynamic situation. 


More Than The Weather to Shiver About...

Evidently the $5.7 billion requested for Trump’s wall is not the primary bone of contention right now.  Pentagon estimators are at work to figure out how to give Trump the funds he will be short on a Congressional compromise for the wall if he accepts half of what he's previously asked for...


The Wall as a Metaphor

From the last presidential campaign, three slogans come to mind that embody the Trumpian call to fearmongering, isolationism and reductionism: “Make America Great Again” and “Lock Her Up” and “Build the Wall.”  While the latter two slogans are action-oriented, “Make America Great Again” is packed with cringe-worthy beliefs that encompass notions of free-loaders (both countries and persons of color), of resentment (of political correctness, multiculturalism, elites, government itself, globalism), and of rightness(finally, someone who will say out loud what I’ve believed all these years and act on it).


Just Because We Can, Does It Mean We Should?

As 2018 winds down, we are exhausted by the moral and political chaos represented by the current administration.


Urgent Threats in Today's Environment

I am nearing the end of the autumn quarter, teaching enterprise risk management to University of Washington Informatics majors. One question that recurs is the subtle difference between a risk and a threat. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a threat as “a person or thing likely to cause damage or danger” and a risk as “a situation involving exposure to danger.” We spend a fair amount of time in discussion of how an organization’s control structure can offset or mitigate both threats and risks. 


The Right to Vote is Hard Earned

When the U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1789, it was meant to be a means by which the states  ascribed powers to the federal government, but its first ten amendments -- the Bill of Rights -- defined limits on the federal government to enumerate constitutional protection for individual liberties.  The principle of representation was an intensely argued one when the Constitution was drafted, most particularly in how slaves would be counted (as three-fifths of a person) in a federal census every ten years.  In her book, These Truths, Jill Lepore notes “The most remarkable consequence of this remarkable arrangement was to grant slave states far greater representation in Congress than free states.” (125)