Managing risk effectively is essential for business success, and thus understanding risk is vital for business executives. Effective risk management increases firm value, whereas poor risk management will damage shareholder wealth. In this article, we examine the risk literacy of business executives and find significant variation among the leaders we sample. Our findings suggest that business executives would be well served to evaluate their own risk literacy, and remediate, if necessary; to work to increase risk literacy in the company’s employees; and to include risk literacy as an important and routine part of the firm’s overall culture. Because the importance of risk literacy increases with business complexity, we believe that risk literacy will only become more important in the future.

有效地管理风险对于业务成功至关重要，因此了解风险对于业务主管来说至关重要。有效的风险管理会增加公司价值，而糟糕的风险管理会损害股东的财富。在本文中，我们考察了企业高管的风险素养，并发现我们抽样的领导者之间存在显着差异。我们的研究结果表明，企业高管可以很好地评估自己的风险素养，并在必要时进行补救；努力提高公司员工的风险素养；并将风险素养纳入公司整体文化的重要和常规部分。因为风险素养的重要性随着业务的复杂性而增加，我们相信风险素养在未来只会变得更加重要。