How To Help Your Company Focus on the New World of Risk

Overcoming these common cultural constraints takes time as well as plenty of deliberate, conscious effort. As your company's designated expert on risk, you have the leverage to play the decisive role. Start by getting your top executives' buy-in to the importance of the new view of strategic risk. Once they hear the company's leaders talking openly about the threats you may face, employees further down the line will realize they have permission to confront the same issues honestly. This will go a long way toward breaking down the cultural taboos that formerly silenced such discussion.

Then push to develop formal processes for surfacing your company's biggest risk issues, developing strategies for addressing and reversing them, and monitoring progress. The old saw, "What gets measured, gets done," is as true today as it ever was. Once strategic risk has a standing place in the agenda of your company's periodic process of self-assessment and goal-setting, it will be much harder for managers to overlook it in the future.

The world of risks that today's corporations face can seem a scary place. But the spreading awareness of these dangerous new realities creates a powerful opportunity for risk managers. Now is the time to start planning the steps you'll use to take advantage of that opportunity and help your company get ahead of the risk curve.

Adrian J. Slywotzky--cited by Industry Week as promising "to be what Peter Drucker was to much of the 20th century, the management guru against whom all others are measured"--is a director of Oliver Wyman. He is the author of the bestselling The Profit Zone (selected by BusinessWeek as one of the ten best books of 1998), Value Migration, and How to Grow When Markets Don't. He has also been published in the Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal and has been a featured speaker at the Davos World Economic Forum, the Microsoft CEO Summit, the Forbes CEO Forum, and the Fortune CEO Conference.

Karl Weber is a freelance writer and editor who has collaborated with Adrian Slywotzky on several books and worked with such authors as former president Jimmy Carter, Loews Hotels CEO Jonathan Tisch, UN ambassador Richard Butler, and representative Richard Gephardt.