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We have all experienced this before. We are riding an elevator at work. An employee steps in from another floor. They ask our thoughts and advice on project X that is ongoing in their area. We respond with some vacuous, yet polite, statement. They exit the elevator.

Consider this scene. A warm summer evening, a tree-lined street, the sound of kids running around laughing, biking, playing a game of street tennis, hockey and skipping rope. The sound of an ice cream truck's bells tinkle in the background.

Three recent events have made me very philosophical. The first involved the renewal of an insurance policy for my firm. Due to many factors, we were at risk of possibly missing the renewal deadline and temporarily losing coverage.

The following scenarios are ripped from the headlines and as a risk manager who is now analyzing risk for a large-scale special event, they have got my full attention.

What a weekend living out of a tent on a farm reminded me about the fundamentals of strategic planning.

So many wondrous feats are taking place this spring and summer: The Nik Wallenda high-wire walk across Niagara Falls, the UEFA Euro 2012 in Poland/Ukraine and, of course, the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in London.

Risk management takes on a whole new level when lives are at stake.

I will never forget this story. It deeply inspired me early in my career. As a young natural gas engineer, I was charged with the installation of microturbines. My job then was to produce microturbine specifications, get the turbines manufactured and have them installed. Each turbine had a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Focusing on people with positive attitudes can take a business far, but it's still important to play devil's advocate.

You are walking toward your car through a poorly lit parking lot late at night. Just one other car is in the lot. You hear a noise behind you. You look back, see nothing and continue at a slightly faster pace. You hear another noise behind you, again no one, but you pick up your pace nonetheless.

You are walking toward your car through a poorly lit parking lot late at night. Just one other car is in the lot. You hear a noise behind you. You look back, see nothing and continue at a slightly faster pace. You hear another noise behind you, again no one, but you pick up your pace nonetheless.

We have all heard the expressions: "You get what you pay for," "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys," and "Nothing in life is free." They all speak to how money drives us.

It appears that 16 is the magic number. All around the world it is the average age where we are perceived to have "a coming of age." It is believed that at 16, we reach a spiritual maturity and are ready to embrace our responsibilities and accountabilities within society.

A silver lining is possible in the uptick in compliance requirements.

Who among us enjoys giving another person bad news? Who among us has the saint-like ability to remain fair-minded with someone who may have treated us poorly in the past? Who among us can resist altering our behavior or decisions if we knew we would be better compensated if we did?

The pendulum of regulation and government oversight has quickly swung from the lighter end of the spectrum to the heavier end -- and there are no signs of it moving back toward the middle.

The role of talent and luck in achieving great success.

A Boeing 767 airliner carrying 231 passengers from Newark, N.J., made an emergency landing on its belly at the Warsaw, Poland, airport in November after an unprecedented landing gear failure.

Recently, I questioned the origin of the word bankruptcy. It was the "bank" portion of the word that triggered my curiosity. I learned that the word is derived from the Latin bancus, meaning bench, and ruptus, meaning broken. Centuries ago, the first bankers set up shop on bench-like tables in open air markets. When they failed their customers or if their banks were found to be unsound in any way, their table was symbolically broken and the insolvent banker was cast off. The bank was broken.

The Scary Tale of Tricks and Haunted Hollow-Perceptions.