The Green Beret Guide to Great Disasters

Green Berets are "Masters of Chaos." What makes us elite is our planning. We prepare not only for the mission but for all the things that could go wrong. We worst-case scenarios in order to prevent them from happening, and being prepared if, despite our best efforts, they do occur. It is a unique mindset that is the hallmark of the Quiet Professionals.

This book is about past disasters and how to avoid them in the future, mitigate their effects and learn from them. As you will see studying significant events, they didn’t just happen, and the people and organizations involved weren’t helpless victims. Taking the attitude things happens is potentially fatal. It ignores painful and tragic lessons from the past. If we’re going to make the deaths and suffering of victims to mean anything, we must learn from them. That is the "gift of failure."

The bottom line is we can predict and prevent many disasters because every disaster involving human interaction has a man-made factor, a cascade event, involved. In other words, we have control over whether shit happens. But it means changing a complacent mindset, getting rid of delusional thinking, and viewing the world around us in a different way.

This book not only dissects these disasters, it outlines ways for individuals and organizations to avoid future disasters.