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Bookshelf Risk management is key for anyone, from the CEO considering an acquisition to the individual contemplating buy- ing a house. But what might be even more important than risk manage- ment, according to David Apgar, is risk assessment. In Risk Intelligence, he theorizes that a company that properly assesses the risk to a par- ticular enterprise wins a distinct competitive advan- tage. Competitors that overestimate the potential risks will decide not to try to break into the market. "Competitors that underestimate those risks will be unprepared for the occasional losses they will suffer and will have to adjust or abandon their projects," he writes. Apgar further believes that some risks are nonrandom and, therefore, learn- able. Executives who can identify learnable risks—and learn about them quickly—will have a better shot at making critical decisions. They might end up managing those risks with the same tools brought to bear by any other manager, but their ability to size up a situation accurately will keep them in the forefront of their markets. (Harvard Business School Press, $29.95) Rosabeth Moss Kanter knows exactly what tomorrow's leader will look like. "Leaders of the future will be progressively more cosmopolitan, innovative, diverse, and values-oriented," she writes. "They will increasingly come from 62 BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2006 In July 1994, 14 firefighters perished fighting a blaze on Colorado's Storm King Mountain, partially because of poor decisions made by an ill-prepared leader. "Excessive optimism, untested assumptions, unheeded warnings, poor intel- ligence, failure to clarify authority: at Storm King, nearly all the great enemies of good decision making were present in abundance," says Wharton professor Michael Useem in The Go Point. Useem's absorb- ing account of the Storm King disaster is only one of the stories he tells of real-life decision making at its most critical and consequential. After interviewing hundreds of lead- ers, Useem distills their collective wisdom into a decision-making template for crucial moments. These include "using small steps to make hard decisions, building a network of counselors and oracles for testing ideas, keeping options open until they must be closed." The book gets the reader's heart racing—and mind working. (Crown Business, $25) countries outside of North America and Europe...where leaders must also address daunting obstacles such as poverty or environmental degra- dation." Kanter is only one of 27 contributors to The Leader of the Future 2, a compilation of essays edited by Frances Hesselbein and Marshall Goldsmith. A sequel to a ten-year-old volume of leadership essays, this book gathers an impres- sive lineup of high-profile experts: Stephen Covey, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Charles Handy, Peter Senge, Ronald Heifetz, Noel Tichy, Jim Kouzes, Barry Posner, and more. Their expertise spans everything from understanding diversity to managing the knowledge worker. The result is a broad look at some of the most pressing questions of leadership today—and tomorrow. (Jossey-Bass, $27.95) Friends and relatives hugging at a memorial as they mourn nine of their local firefighters. These nine were among 14 firefighters killed in a freak blowup when the wind changed during a manageable fire and trapped them within it on Storm King Mountain, Colorado. If you could redesign and rebrand your desktop stapler, what would it look like and how would you market it? That's one of the exer- cises Lynn Altman offers in Brand It Yourself, a practical and easy-to-read book that bubbles with ideas. Altman and her partner have developed Brandmaker Express, a ten-day process through which they create branding cam- paigns for new products, and she generously shares every detail of that process here. She advocates a short turnaround because the tight timeframe helps spark creativity and fuel adrenaline; she also focuses on one project, and one singular attribute of the product, at a time. Presenting unused ideas from real campaigns—as well as an ongo- ing deconstruction of that stapler GAYLON WAMPLER/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES