How New Risk Management Helps Leaders Master Uncertainty

This book helps the organization’s top leader gather the information needed to identify opportunities and threats and decide on the appropriate risk response in this uncertain world. Risk is the effect of uncertainty on the ability of an organization to meet its strategic objectives. The effects of uncertainty are expressed as opportunities and threats. Yet, most people associate risk with hazards and losses (i.e., pure risk). Unlike pure risk, uncertainty risk is not insurable because of its upside risk opportunities. Risk management is a key element of the open-sourced, high-level structure developed by the International Organization for Standardization. This structure for managing important organizational programs has been adopted by over 180 country standard-setting organizations. This book helps the organization’s top leader gather the information needed to identify opportunities and threats and decide on the appropriate risk response in this uncertain world. The two most widely used risk management standards are presented to demonstrate that an organization can use either one or a combination of the two standards to help manage the effects of uncertainty on their organization. It’s fool-worthy to attempt to run an organization without formal uncertainty risk management. Let this book help you find your company’s way in an uncertain world.

Modern risk management as practiced today faces significant obstacles—we argue—primarily due to the fundamental premise of the concept itself. It asserts that we are mainly dealing with measurable, quantifiable risks and that we can manage the uncontrollable by relying on formal control-based systems, which has produced a general view that (enterprise) risk management is a technical-scientific discipline. Strategic Risk Leadership offers a critique of the status quo, and encourages leaders, executives, and chief risk officers to find fresh approaches that can help them deal more proactively with what the future may hold. The book provides an overview of the history of risk management and current risk governance approaches as prescribed by leading risk management standards, such as COSO and ISO31000. This enables practitioners to challenge the frameworks and improve their adoption in practice introducing sustainable resilience as a (more) meaningful response to uncertain and unknowable conditions. The book shows how traditional thinking downplays the significance of human behavior and judgmental biases as key elements of major organizational exposures illustrated and explained through numerous case examples and studies. This book is essential reading for strategic risk managers to understand the requirements for effective risk governance practices in the contemporary and rapidly changing global risk landscape. Indeed, it is a valuable resource for all risk executives, leaders, and chief risk officers, as well as advanced students of risk management.

The market is like the sea: it gives, and it takes away. That became apparent once again when the economy and society went into “lockdown” due to the coronavirus outbreak. Organizations will either sink or swim, and only the pros will be able to keep their heads above water. This is a self-help book for managers, supervisors and administrators who see themselves as skippers at the helm of an organization in times of turbulence, uncertainty and complexity. It provides a number of the latest handy management models, such as the Three-Phase Model, Governance Model and Management Matrix, which help leaders and managers arrive at well thought-out risk management decisions. In addition, the practical cases and discussion questions in each chapter help readers implement these models in their organizations. The book is an English translation of the Dutch book ‘Varen in de mist’, which was nominated for the Dutch Management Book of the Year.

Every organization faces diffi cult decisions when managing risk and the potential consequences of its manifestation. For a more thorough outlook on risk, organizations should also evaluate and engage with its advantages. Organizational Risk Management: Managing for Uncertainty and Ambiguity covers a series of perspectives that represent both causal and interpretative frameworks. These perspectives shed light on how organizational structures and processes adapt amid a complex, dynamic organizational environment in an effort to manage and exploit the accompanying risks of that environment. This volume will oftentimes challenge the expectation for and utility of clarity in crisis situations, thereby favoring uncertainty and ambiguity as the necessary conditions to exploit organizational risk and explore opportunities that rely on interpretation, learning, and knowledge among individuals. The ultimate objective of Organizational Risk Management: Managing for Uncertainty and Ambiguity is to promote discussion among practitioners and organizational scholars who venture to understand organizational risk. Setting such a goal is to essentially practice what this volume shall inevitably preach: engage one another in order to proactively monitor and respond to risk. Strengthening ties along the bridge between practice and science will be a welcomed consequence of this volume.

The #1 international bestselling author of The Gray Rhino offers a bold new framework for understanding and re-shaping our relationship with risk and uncertainty to live more productive and successful lives. What drives a sixty-four-year-old woman to hurl herself over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Why do we often create bigger risks than the risks we try to avoid? Why are corporate boards newly worried about risky personal behavior by CEOs? Why are some nations quicker than others to recognize and manage risks like pandemics, technological change, and climate crisis? The answers define each person, organization, and society as distinctively as a fingerprint. Understanding the often-surprising origins of these risk fingerprints can open your eyes, inspire new habits, catalyze innovation and creativity, improve teamwork, and provide a beacon in a world that seems suddenly more uncertain than ever. How you see risk and what you do about it depend on your personality and experiences. How you make these cost-benefit calculations depend on your culture, your values, the people in the room, and even unexpected things like what you’ve eaten recently, the temperature, the music playing, or the fragrance in the air. Being alert to these often-unconscious influences will help you to seize opportunity and avoid danger. You Are What You Risk is a clarion call for an entirely new conversation about our relationship with risk and uncertainty. In this ground-breaking, accessible and eminently timely book, Michele Wucker examines why it’s so important to understand your risk fingerprint and how to make your risk relationship work better in business, life, and the world. Drawing on compelling risk stories around the world and weaving in economics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology research, Wucker bridges the divide between professional and lay risk conversations. She challenges stereotypes about risk attitudes, re-frames how gender and risk are related, and shines new light on generational differences. She shows how the new science of “risk personality” is re-shaping business and finance, how healthy risk ecosystems support economies and societies, and why embracing risk empathy can resolve conflicts. Wucker shares insights, practical tools, and proven strategies that will help you to understand what makes you who you are –and, in turn, to make better choices, both big and small.

Using his experiences of life in the corporate jungle, K.F. Dochartaigh has produced a survival manual that assists and guides the reader on how best to navigate corporate pitfalls and avoid being ‘trapped’. The book fuses three separate but intertwined disciplines of the animal kingdom, the guerrilla battlefield, and the corporate world to help establish patterns of behavior and to understand the motivations that drive each action. All three areas share a common environment: the jungle, where visibility is limited, and ambush is the only method of attack by predators. The book blends animal and human psychology and provides safe passage in all its encounters. This book does not condone war—in fact, quite the opposite—and, as you will see, it takes more of a defensive position in repelling attacks and seeks to promote the occurrence of collaboration over individual competition, which will also become apparent. It is not a “call to arms” or a promotion of anarchy—not by any stretch of the imagination—as it merely assists the individual in adapting within their environment in order to ensure their survival. Whether you work as an accountant, IT consultant, lawyer, salesperson, or project manager, the same logic still applies because there is a natural order in all corporate vocations.

This book is aimed at managerial decision makers, practitioners in any field, and the academic community. The chapter authors have integrated theory with evidence-based practice to go beyond merely explaining cybersecurity topics. To accomplish this, the editors drew upon the combined cognitive intelligence of 46 scholars from 11 countries to present the state of the art in cybersecurity. Managers and leaders at all levels in organizations around the globe will find the explanations and suggestions useful for understanding cybersecurity risks as well as formulating strategies to mitigate future problems. Employees will find the examples and caveats both interesting as well as practical for everyday activities at the workplace and in their personal lives. Cybersecurity practitioners in computer science, programming, or espionage will find the literature and statistics fascinating and more than likely a confirmation of their own findings and assumptions. Government policymakers will find the book valuable to inform their new agenda of protecting citizens and infrastructure in any country around the world. Academic scholars, professors, instructors, and students will find the theories, models, frameworks, and discussions relevant and supportive to teaching as well as research.