Thank you to my agent, John Wright, for his engagement, support, and encouragement, and to Bill Falloon at John Wiley & Sons for taking me on as a new author over 10 years ago and for welcoming me into the Wiley community. Thank you to the whole Wiley team, especially my editors, Purvi Patel and Manikandan Kuppan, for their careful and diligent shepherding of the manuscript and Samantha Enders for her book design.

Thank you to Cathy Hampson, Jon Holland, Nicole Hubert, Lorinda Opsahl-Ong, Ilya Rozenfeld, David Silverman, Mark Taylor, Jedediah Turner, and Jan Voigts—my friends, colleagues, and peers who generously agreed to review portions of the first edition of this book, and to Nancy Foster, Kevin Oden, and Spyro Karetsos for taking on the second edition and for all of their thoughts and suggestions. This is a much stronger work as a result of your excellent insight and in-depth knowledge of the field of operational risk. I am grateful to you all for taking time to review and improve the manuscript when you are very busy managing operational risk on a daily basis. Any remaining weaknesses and errors in the book are entirely my own doing.

Thank you to all of the risk teams that I have worked in over the past 15 years; I have learned so much from all of you.

Thank you to both ORX and IBM FIRST for providing external loss data for analysis with a generous spirit and remarkable efficiency.

Thank you to Penelope Vance for coaching me through the entire process for the first edition, for asking all the right questions at the right time, and for continuing to be a voice of reason at all times.

Thank you to GARP for generously allowing the reuse of content that I wrote for one of their course textbooks.

Finally, a special thank you to my children, Leah, Holly, Tegwen, Hayley, and Allison, for their patience with me as I wrote, and to my husband, Joe, for his constant encouragement that I could, and should, write and rewrite this book.