Risk Management / Case studies

Your new book is about managing strategy in turbulent times. What factors must a CIO, in particular, balance when responding to a crisis?

Research by one of the UK’s major supplies of ‘future foresight’ has found that 60 percent of organisations are currently not considered ‘fit for the future’ and are at a considerable disadvantage to those who are ‘future thinkers’.
Ross O. Storey shared thoughts with Dr Michael Jackson, the chairman of ShapingTomorrow.com, which helps nearly 13,000 people from more than 6,000 organisations across the globe anticipate and better prepare for emerging global opportunities and risks.

Reader ROI

Risk management once used to focus on insurance. If you wanted to manage your risks, you bought insurance cover. But, before you can insure against a risk, you have to know it exists - and that's easier said then done. Every business is exposed to a range of risks, and business owners can't be expected to identify and manage them all. No matter how thorough, there will inevitably be some risks that get overlooked.
That's borne out by a study veteran risk management consultant Allan Morris was involved in around 1997. He and his colleagues profiled a mid-sized manufacturing and exporting business to catalogue all of its risks. The list ran to more than 700, and only about 20 per cent of them were found to be insurable.

Around the table
Steven Cooper, IT operations manager, GPT Group

The question that inevitably follows the emergence of a crisis in
banking and financial systems such as the current one is as simple as

As accounting jobs go, it doesn't get much better. CFO of a big bank, working with a respected chief executive, in an organisation you love. But when Steve McKerihan, the CFO of St George Bank, saw a job advertised in his local church newsletter last year he thought: "This could be what I'm really meant to do."
In July, McKerihan left St George after a 30-year career in banking to work for the Anglican Church as chief executive of the Sydney Diocesan Secretariat. The numbers are a lot smaller: a balance sheet measured in the hundreds of millions, instead of $100 billion; 90 staff rather than 200 (out of St George's 8500); and a pay packet that has shrunk by two-thirds. Yet McKerihan, in an interview one month into his new role, says he feels better prepared than he did for his only other job switch, when he left the Commonwealth Bank to join St George 22 years ago. "I don't feel I'm taking a step backwards," he says. "The operations are on a different scale, but I'm still working with very professional people."