A Spy's Guide To Taking Risks

This was great fun to read. And reminds me of every time I've been late in European cities while taking public transportation and trying to find a way to salvage an appointment or airport arrival with alternate routes... haha! Also very practical help for the paranoid...

Risk analysis is with us in everything that we do on a daily basis yet it is something that many people rarely consider objectively. Hence many take risks where with a little thought, mindfulness, and observation they would see there is little chance of a good outcome yet at the same time ignore opportunities where the risk is minimal and the outcome would be very beneficial. This small book is a fascinating and succinct insight into the risk and potential rewards of success or failure, where under pressure and on the fly. By using the simple model outlined here, you can decide more accurately whether a potential outcome has a chance to be good or disastrous or whether that outcome has a low or high chance of success. And when the brain is busy exploring and worrying over all the potential things that can go wrong, whether the possibility of all the necessary components that would cause that disaster are probable or even conceivable. Simply put this is a book about deciding on a course of action from a number of options and on whether the risk associated with that action is likely or not to provide the desired outcome and how to analyze those two things in a high-pressure situation. Told in the first person and from experience gained over the years of operating in some of the most dangerous places on the planet, these are the thought processes that kept him alive. This is a great little book for entrepreneurs, corporate executives or just about anyone who looks back and thinks they could have made better decisions. I’ve also read the previous two guides that John has produced, The Spies Guide to Thinking and The Spies Guide to Strategy and this is a perfect addition.

I enjoyed this book, along with the rest of the series. I appreciate the author's style, because it seems like the way a spy would write. I would have liked if some of the strategies were broken down into a more generic set of guidelines, to make them easier to incorporate into my own boring, non-spy life, but it was good.

These guides are extremely helpful in piecing together an idea of how the process of intelligence gathering occurs. These are practical methods that are applicable to more situations than the books are obviously intended. Though, the title of these books exemplify an ad hoc representation of its purpose one can utilize the step by step reasoning in situations that require situational awareness and weighing of consequences outside of espionage. This book was extremely well written and was able to merge not only tactics involved in clandestine operations but provided the break down of each step in the processes of the logic involved in decision making within an exciting scenario. The authors ability to present to the reader an applied knowledge toward real life situations made each concept easier to comprehend and offered a way to form precedents within the minds of those who could potentially encounter similar situations in their lives. Great job! 10/10

Interesting, informative, well written, and truly fun to read! Although John Braddock's Spy series is an introduction to some of the mental aspects of becoming a espionage agent. I find that information Braddock is presenting can be both useful and practical in daily life. And example would be getting home repair or improvement estimates from unknown/unused construction vendor's. The book's would be a worthwhile addition to any home library.

This short read ties together the other books in the series. The framework used to analyze risks seemed a bit flimsy, but then again, real-life doesn't fit into a framework.

How to analyze risk when you don’t have much time and you don’t know all the variables Braddock describes a system of ANDs and ORs – keep the ORs (options) high in the model and keep the ANDs (must-haves) lower and achievable. To improve your odds, add another OR. Create another way for things to work out. Create another chance for success. Create another opportunity to check your process. Short, readable book – great for teaching young adults a healthy strategy for taking reasonable risks. Easy to remember, easy to teach, easy to improvise. Good stuff.

This book is a teaching book about taking risks. How to adapt to a changing situations. How one misstep can change a situation.

I have the entire Spy’s Guide series, and this one stacks up along the other two - Thinking and Strategy. They’ve all helped me shape a character I’m writing in my own fiction. It’s not easy to find spy books where the action is illustrating the spy concepts in a manageable way. This series also inspired me to look deeper into game theory. Indispensable for the curious, the spy-enthusiasts, researchers, and writers. I hope he keeps writing them so I can keep reading them. Oh, and I suggest the audible narration add-on. The vocal narration works so well with these books. The voice of the narrator suits the genre as well.

I have become a mini Braddock fan. Read 3 of his books today and they were all brilliant. The one on risk was perhaps the best - tightly edited and brilliantly told. Original like his previous books. Worth the time ;-)

Braddock embeds his message in a story that captures your attention and interrogates your imagination. Wondering if you could do it yourself is torture.

It's a story about a mission, and that is the exiting part. Fast paced writing style here. But it is interlinked with a "analysis" of risk taking strategy, which is very repetitive. Short sentences, and everything said 3 times (some Greek or Roman guy said that's how you should do it. But i found it irritating) to the author, as you asked for a review: better than repeating yourself, go one level deeper so that it clicks for people the first time you say it. The aha moment is missing sometimes.

I am a risk manager but didn't buy this book to link with that. However, it was so good, couldn't put it down, probably my favourite out of the 3 in the series. The author has such a great way of explaining things, really captures your interest. Superb book and will help with my thought process when I am carrying out future training sessions and workshops. Highly recommend.