risk culture

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,…

7 Questions for Understanding the Fundamentals of Risk Appetite

The concept of risk appetite is probably the most confusing and controversial part of the enterprise risk management process. If you do a search for risk appetite, you will find a wide variety of perspectives on how to develop and use it. While there may be an implied risk appetite or a generic statement on…

Disjointed vs. Embedding in Culture and Mindset – A Key Difference Between Traditional Risk Management and ERM

One of the big differences between traditional risk management and ERM is the role risk plays in the organization. I briefly discussed this point at a high-level in my popular article linked above. And while the point of disjointed vs. embedded in culture and mindset is connected to other differences mentioned in the article, the…

ERM Implementation: What Risk Professionals Consider the #1 Challenge To Be

Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadI recently asked of fellow risk professionals “what is your single biggest challenge when it comes to ERM implementation?” What do you think the answers were? Maybe figuring out how to assess risks? Maybe integrating with strategy? Or aggregation of risks? Nope. Tone at the top! Yes, the executives…

risk culture

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