Risk
Risk is high on the list of important topics keeping CEOs up at night — such a simple four-letter word, yet one fraught with peril. When we think of risk, the typical things come to mind, like financial risk and cybersecurity risk. But look around, and leaders suddenly have risks coming at them from everywhere. It’s enough to make us want to crawl under the sheets and hide. Being a leader means we take on risk and, to a certain extent, are comfortable with it. My, though, the risk list has gotten long.
One CEO I spoke with wants to know what risk he’s not even thinking about. What are the known unknowns or, worse, the unknown unknowns? What could come at me that I’m not even thinking of? Another said to me: “Anthea, we were about 12 when we had to deal with inflation and the Jimmy Carter era of 17% interest rates. None of us have had to manage in inflationary times. So how do we manage inflationary risk when none of us have done it?”
Another took his team through a Gartner assessment and, instead of going down to his direct reports, he went down to the top 50 leaders in his company. He wanted to go far enough down in the organization to where he found the input beneficial because people are thinking of things and seeing things that “we aren’t thinking about up in the C-suite.” So, what kinds of risks are out there? Here’s just the shortlist of things I’m hearing about, some certainly interrelated:
- Talent risk
- Brand/reputation risk
- Cybersecurity risk
- Financial risk
- DE&I risk
- Competitive risk
- Succession planning risk (“key man/woman down” risk)
- Earthquake, flood, hurricane, and fire risk (“Mother Nature is mad” risk)
- Pandemic risk
- Regulatory risk
- Supplier risk
- Fraud risk
- Legal risk
- Economic risk
- Geopolitical risk
I was going to stop at a dozen but decide to add in legal risk because someone flinging lawsuits in any of the above categories is definitely a risk. And now you always have to toss in an economic event or a geopolitical one as something that could go wrong. It’s enough to drive us bonkers, but then most CEOs have to be a little bonkers to take on the role at all.
So, what’s keeping you up at night? What risks are you most focused upon? Are you worried about new products not hitting the mark? Competitors launching new threats, or new competitors coming out of nowhere? Is it the next pandemic or the next weather event? Somehow, the list seems so much longer, but maybe all these risks were hanging around all the time, and now they’re just more visible.
Send me a note about the risks you’re most focused on, and know that we have experts who can assist in many of these areas. Risk is a major category of information services because where there’s risk, there’s a need for information — and that, my friends, makes our industry go ’round. Make money, save money or mitigate risk — that’s what makes information sell, so I guess at the end of the day, all that risk is a good thing for many in our industry.
We’re here to help! Risk away!