Douglas Hubbard is a management consultant, speaker, and author in decision sciences and actuarial science. He is the inventor of the Applied Information Economics method and founder of Hubbard Decision Research. He is the author of How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business, The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It, Pulse: The New Science of Harnessing Internet Buzz to Track Threats and Opportunities and his latest book, How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk. Since 2017, two of his books have been on the required reading list for the Society of Actuariesexam prep. In addition to his books, Hubbard has been published in several periodicals including Nature, the IBM Journal of Research and Development, OR/MS Today, Analytics, CIO, Information Week, and Architecture Boston. His books have been selected for required, recommended, and suggested reading by multiple business schools such as the School of Business and Economics, Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, and Carl H. Lindner College of Business. He is known for taking a critical view of several popular methods and standards in risk management and decision making in organizations. He argues that extensive research in methods such as "risk matrices", the use of weighted scores in decision making, and even expert intuition are inferior to certain quantitative methods. Hubbard began his management consulting career at Coopers & Lybrand in 1988 after finishing his MBA at the University of South Dakota. He formed in 1998 to focus on the practical application of several fields of quantitative analysis. His methods have been adopted in insurance, financial services, pharmaceutical, healthcare, utilities, energy, federal and state government, entertainment media, military logistics, aerospace R&D, cybersecurity, and manufacturing. His work is frequently cited in both management and academic publications. Hubbard is perhaps best known for his assertions that everything can be measured, and that initial measurements are the most valuable as they reduce the greatest amounts of uncertainty.
Books
How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business
The Failure of Risk Management: Why It's Broken and How to Fix it
Pulse: The New Science of Harnessing Internet Buzz to Track Threats and Opportunities
How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk
His first two books are listed on the Book List for the Society of Actuaries Exam Prep.
Other Publications
Shepherd, K., Hubbard, D., Fenton, N., Claxton, K., Luedeling, E., & deLeeuw, J.. Policy: Development goals should enable decision-making. Nature. July 2015. https://doi.org/10.1038/523152a
Hubbard, D., & Samuelson, D. A.. Analysis placebos: The difference between perceived and real benefits of risk analysis and decision models. . Fall 2009.
Hubbard, D., & Samuelson, D. A.. Modeling Without Measurements: How the decision analysis culture’s lack of empiricism reduces its effectiveness. OR/MS Today, 36, 26-31.
Hubard, D.. It's all an illusion: The perception that many things are immeasurable is common — it’s also an illusion. ArchitectureBoston. .
Hubbard, D.. Expert analysis: An effective measure. CIO: ROIowa. August 2003.
