Elaine Chao: What we read in 2024
“Uncertainty and Enterprise: Venturing Beyond the Known” is a must-read for anyone seeking a roadmap to the bewildering array of new technologies exploding today. Written with considerable charm by the distinguished economist and scholar Amar Bhidé—my Harvard Business School classmate and now a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health—the book makes a compelling case that hard facts alone cannot prove or predict whether a new political movement, business idea, technology or TV series will succeed. The author offers a fascinating array of stories, examples and ideas of great thinkers—some well-known, like John Maynard Keynes, others more obscure, like the economist Frank H. Knight—rather than relying solely on math or statistics. This book provides a new way of looking not only at risk but, more importantly, at uncertainty in an unpredictable world.
Ms. Chao is a former U.S. secretary of labor and secretary of transportation.