Winning the battle of risk management by learning from others
My favourite way to learn is from others. I’d much rather catch a new computer trick by looking over your shoulder then taking a computer class. In this month’s blog, we’ll be looking at others who have experienced recent corporate risk or are sharing their risk management lessons. Either way, there are great take-away lessons to learn from. 
The ultimate goal is to avoid or minimize a crisis by improving risk assessment. Risk management is the ‘identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events or to maximize the realization of opportunities.’
Lesson 1: Tales from the road: lessons learned from the GRC Summit
This blog is a re-cap of lessons learned from an educational summit. It’s loaded with nuggets of risk management lessons. ‘Taking an intelligent approach to identifying and communicating the types and amount of risk that can be accepted is critical to effective and efficient risk management.’
Lesson 2: Lessons learned from the Lululemon recall
Lululemon’s recent recall of its unintentionally see-through yoga pants caused quite a stir proving that having a risk strategy (in this case, re-call strategy) is critical. The article properly points out that it’s not a matter of ‘if’ the risk will happen, rather ‘when’. Lululemon effectively stopped the recall from spinning out of control by communicating what the problem was and how they were going to fix it before too many complaints rolled in.
Lesson 3: Getting in bed with risk management
Returning to lessons learned at an Executive Summit, we learn the top 10 categories of risk. From external to political risks, and everything in between. ‘Rarely does a single event cause a tragedy. It’s a cascade of events … there were problems lying in wait,’ The Titanic is used as an example, an iceberg didn’t cause its demise, a series of events, leading up to the iceberg caused it.
Crack down on risk at your company by having a risk management strategy. If there are any cracks, a well thought out plan will help ensure that the crack is small, and manageable.
Ever caught with a crisis and no plan? How’d you manage it? Feel free to leave a comment below or shout out to us on Facebook or Twitter. Of course, you could always write your own blog post on the subject and share it with us… We’d love to read it!
