Risk management has become a key factor of successful organizations. Despite risk management's importance, outdated and inappropriate ideas about how to manage risk dominate. This book challenges existing paradigms of risk management and provides readers with new concepts and tools for the current dynamic risk management environment. The framework for the book is a series of questions that allows for an interesting and thought-provoking look at current ideas and forward-looking concepts. This book, intended for senior managers, directors, risk managers, students of risk management, and all others who need to be concerned about risk management and strategy, provides a solid base for not only understanding current best practice in risk management, but also the conceptual tools for exploiting emerging risk management technologies, metrics, regulations, and ideas. The central thesis is that risk management is a value-adding activity that all types of organizations, public, private as well as not-for-profit, can use for competitive advantage and maximum effectiveness.

Risk. It’s a given factor in the operation of any organization. From corporate fraud and security issues to technological and other man-made disasters, bad things do happen. And while many businesses build elaborate defenses against these unexpected occurrences, often employing powerful technology to help detect and prevent them, most risk-assessment strategies fail to connect the dots before it’s too late. This book, based on the author’s extensive experience analyzing the sources of corporate and organizational failure, reveals how a company can mitigate risk using available resources, including what may be the most important asset: its people. Readers will discover valuable strategies, enabling them to: Draw “actionable intelligence” from enormous amounts of data • Quickly make better-informed assessments and decisions • Tap into the rich human sources of information that can directly alert them to signs of risk • Do a better job of anticipat ing and avoiding problems Filled with practical, real-world insight and featuring interviews with experienced risk practitioners, this book will help any business recognize the first signs of trouble.

Rethinking Risk and the Precautionary Principle challenges the claim that the precautionary principle is an appropriate guide to public policy decision-making in the face of uncertainty. The precautionary principle is frequently invoked as a justification for regulating human activities. From bans on the use of growth hormones in cattle to restrictions on children's playground activities, precautionary thinking seems to be taking over our lives. As the contributors to this book show, such an approach is of dubious utility and may even be counterproductive. This is a timely and important contribution to the debate on how to manage risk in the modern world. The editor, Julian Morris, is Director of the Environment and Technology Programme at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. He has written widely on issues relating to environmental protection and technological development. - Up to date discussion of current issues and scientific controversies - Challenges the claim that the 'precautionary principle' is an appropriate guide to public policy decisions

This book examines the role of risk management in the recent financial crisis and applies lessons from there to the national security realm. It rethinks the way risk contributes to strategy, with insights relevant to practitioners and scholars in national security as well as business. Over the past few years, the concept of risk has become one of the most commonly discussed issues in national security planning. And yet the experiences of the 2007-2008 financial crisis demonstrated critical limitations in institutional efforts to control risk. The most elaborate and complex risk procedures could not cure skewed incentives, cognitive biases, groupthink, and a dozen other human factors that led companies to take excessive risk. By embracing risk management, the national security enterprise may be turning to a discipline just as it has been discredited.

The report describes the development of a new risk management culture within professions, companies and governments. The obsession with managing risk is creating organisations which are not so much risk averse as ‘responsibility averse’. In medicine, doctors are practising ‘defensive medicine’ where opinions are heavily qualified with caveats and patients left to make big decisions. The report also refers to growing evidence that since Enron’s failure, major accountancy firms are declining to work with ‘high risk’ clients - the very ones that should be thoroughly audited. “When disclaimer paragraphs are longer than the professional opinions they follow, we know something has gone wrong,” says author Professor Michael Power, a director of the ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation at the London School of Economics. “In the interests of transparency, small print should be made large and ruled out as a secondary risk management ploy. “The trends in professions such as medicine and auditing signal a withdrawal of individual judgement from the public. Minimal records are kept, staff are cautioned about the use of email, and normal correspondence is littered with disclaimers. The risk management of everything implies a society of ‘small print’.” Power sees the rise of the ‘risk management of everything’ as a related trend to the audit culture, which included the government’s now widely criticised love of targets as a policy tool. The Audit Explosion, Power’s previous Demos pamphlet, predicted that the overuse of audit leads to a focus on measurable outputs rather than real outcomes. “The most influential dimension of the audit explosion is the process by which [organisations] are made auditable and structured to conform to the need to be monitored,” Power wrote in 1994. Power’s new book argues that risk management is the ‘new audit’ and is having a similar distorting effect on the performance of professionals, companies and government.