risk culture

Building a Performance-Focused Risk Management Process Step #3: Enable and Empower

For today’s post, I would like to share an article originally published in the Fall 2020 issue of The Demotech Difference, a journal targeting midsize property & casualty insurance companies. This article is the third in a four-part series exploring the foundations of a performance-focused risk management process. Articles one and two in the series…

Building a Performance-Focused Risk Management Process Step #2: Identifying Need

Early this summer, I shared an article discussing how important culture is to the success of a company’s risk management efforts and what executives can begin doing immediately to change it. The article originally appeared in The Demotech Difference, a journal targeting midsize property & casualty insurance firms. Today’s post explores the second step in…

3 Easy to Use Tips to Understanding Why Executives Want ERM

Any endeavor, whether it is personal or in business, has a reason or motivation for its pursuit. Take exercise for example… If you’ve ever hit the gym, taken a Zumba class, or worked with a trainer, there was an underlying motivation. Example motivations are a desire to lose weight, build strength, build endurance so you…

Will the Wells Fargo Settlement Actually Result in Change?

In some of my prior articles on reputation and positive risk culture, I’ve sometimes referred to the ongoing Wells Fargo saga. From 2002 until coming to light in 2016, the company engaged in a variety of fraudulent activities. Unrealistic sales targets aggressively pushed by leadership led many employees to create thousands of bogus accounts. The…

7 Tips for Reducing Business Continuity Risk for ERM

Here’s a situation that is all too common… A company hires a new director for ERM. This person’s job is to design and implement an ERM process for helping executives make risk-informed decisions and understand threats and opportunities to achieving strategic objectives. At some point, this ERM Director decides to leave the company and the…

Real-Life Example of Robust Enterprise Risk Management

Today we have a special guest – Hans Læssøe. As you may know, Hans’ perspective is something I reference often here on the blog. We finally got a chance to catch up! In this interview, Hans and I discuss his background, what led his former company, LEGO, to adopt ERM, and a few factors key…

Protecting Trade Secrets: Finding the Right Balance

Out of all potential sources of a company’s value, tangible or intangible, trade secrets are often the most valuable. While the theft of trade secrets is nothing new, it is an ongoing and growing problem that leads to over $300 billion in annual losses according to the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property.…

Are Qualitative Risk Assessments Fatally Flawed?

Early last month, I published an article explaining why I don’t discuss quantitative assessment methods like modeling, Monte Carlo simulation, and others very much and what companies must have in place before they can use methods like this to guide their decision making and strategic planning. In short, without establishing corporate governance policies, a strategic…

Chief Risk Officer: An Increasingly Vital Role in Effective Risk Oversight

The 2019 State of Risk Oversight report from NC State recently came out with some interesting results about the current state of risk management leadership in organizations. The report breaks down results into four different industry-categories – large organizations, public companies, financial institutions, and not-for-profit. Over the last five years, nonprofits have seen the biggest…

Poor Risk Culture Leads to Largest Corporate Fine in Australia’s History

I had an interesting conversation a few months ago with a risk professional in Australia who told me about a scandal involving his country’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). CBA not only operates in Australia, but also New Zealand, Asia, the U.S. and the U.K. Unlike banks in the U.S. and Europe,…

risk culture

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