Douglas W. Hubbard


Douglas Hubbard is a management consultant, speaker, and author in decision sciences and actuarial science.

Career

Hubbard was a business analyst at Coopers & Lybrand in 1988 after finishing his MBA at the University of South Dakota. He formed Hubbard Decision Research in 1998.

Views

He is critical 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 expert intuition are inferior to certain quantitative methods.
Hubbard is known for asserting that everything can be measured, and that initial measurements are the most valuable as they reduce the greatest amounts of uncertainty.

Selected publications

Books

His first two books are listed on the Book List for the Society of Actuaries Exam Prep.
His books are on the reading list at School of Business and Economics, Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, and Carl H. Lindner College of Business.

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., & Evans, D.. Problems with scoring methods and ordinal scales in risk assessment. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 54, 2–1. doi.org/10.1147/jrd.2010.2042914
  • 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.
  • Hubbard, 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.
  • Mayor, T., & Hubbard, D.. Case study: Red light, green light. CIO Enterprise Magazine. October, 2001.
  • Worthen, B., & Hubbard., D.. Case Study: Two Teams are better than one. CIO Enterprise Magazine. 2001.
  • Hubbard, D. W.. Risk vs. return. InformationWeek,, 105.

    Awards

  • 2017 PaloAlto Networks Cybersecurity Canon Award
  • 2017 Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce Fellow