Organizations face challenges in adapting their current business and operational activities to dynamic contexts. Successful companies share a common characteristic of dealing with the emergent risks and threats in responses that generate viable solutions. Strategic risk management (SRM) is a multidisciplinary and rather fractured field of study, which creates significant challenges for research. This short-form book provides an expert overview of the topic, providing insight into the theory and practice. Essential reading for strategic management researchers, the authors frame the fundamental principles, emerging challenges and responses for the future, which will also provide valuable insights for adjacent business disciplines and beyond.
This book presents a new approach to risk management that enables executives to think systematically and strategically about future risks and deal proactively with threats to their competitive advantages in an ever more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. Organizations typically manage risks through traditional tools such as insurance and risk mitigation; some employ enterprise risk management, which looks at risk holistically throughout the organization. But these tools tend to focus organizational attention on past actions and compliance. Executives need to tackle risk head-on as an integral part of their strategic planning process, not by looking in the rearview mirror. Strategic Risk Management (SRM) is a forward-looking approach that helps teams anticipate events or exposures that fundamentally threaten or enhance a firm's position. The authors, experts in both business strategy and risk management, define strategic risks and show how they differ from operational risks. They offer a road map that describes architectural elements of SRM (knowledge, principles, structures, and tools) to show how leaders can integrate them to effectively design and implement a future-facing SRM program. SRM gives organizations a competitive advantage over those stuck in outdated risk management practices. For the first time, it enables them to look squarely out the front windshield.
STRATEGIC RISK MANAGEMENT Having just experienced a global pandemic that sent equity markets into a tailspin in March 2020, risk management is a more relevant topic than ever. It remains, however, an often poorly understood afterthought. Many portfolios are designed without any thought given to risk management before they are handed off to a dedicated—but separate—risk management team. In Strategic Risk Management: Designing Portfolios and Managing Risk, Campbell R. Harvey, Sandy Rattray, and Otto Van Hemert deliver a reimagining of the risk management process. The book envisions a marriage between the investment and risk processes, an approach that has proven successful at the world’s largest publicly listed hedge fund, Man Group. The authors provide readers with a new framework for portfolio design that includes defensive strategies, drawdown risk controls, volatility targeting, and actively timing rebalancing trades. You will learn about how the book’s new approach to risk management fared during the recent market drawdown at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. You will also discover why the traditional risk weighting approach only works on certain classes of assets. The book shows you how to accurately evaluate the costs of defensive strategies and which ones offer the best and most cost-effective protection against market downturns. Finally, you will learn how to obtain a more balanced return stream by targeting volatility rather than a constant notional exposure and gain a deeper understanding of concepts like portfolio rebalancing. Perfect for people working in the asset management industry and financial policy makers, Strategic Risk Management: Designing Portfolios and Managing Risk will also earn a place in the libraries of economics and finance scholars, as well as casual readers who take an active approach to investing in their savings or pension assets. PRAISE FOR STRATEGIC RISK MANAGEMENT “Strategic Risk Management shows how to fully embed risk management into the portfolio management process as an equal partner to alpha. This should clearly be best practice for all asset managers.” —Jase Auby, Chief Investment Officer, the Teacher Retirement System of Texas “This book shows the power of integrating risk and investment management, rather than applying risk management as an afterthought to satisfy set limits. I was pleased to shepherd some of the key ideas in this book through the publication process at The Journal of Portfolio Management.” —Frank J. Fabozzi, Editor, The Journal of Portfolio Management “Financial markets today are quite different from those of the last century. Understanding leverage, correlations, tails, and other risk parameters of a portfolio is at least as important as work on signals and alpha. In that sense, bringing risk management from ‘control’ to ‘front office’ should be a priority for asset managers. This book explains how to do it.” —Marko Kolanovic, Chief Global Market Strategist, J.P. Morgan A powerful new approach to risk management in volatile and uncertain markets While the COVID-19 pandemic threw the importance of effective risk management into sharp relief, many investment firms hang on to a traditional and outdated model of risk management. Using siloed and independent portfolio management and risk monitoring teams, these firms miss out on the opportunities presented by integrated risk management. Strategic Risk Management: Designing Portfolios and Managing Risk delivers a fresh approach to risk management in difficult market conditions. The accomplished author team advocates for the amalgamation of portfolio design and risk monitoring teams, incorporating risk management into every aspect of portfolio design. The book provides a roadmap for the crucial aspects of portfolio design, including defensive strategies, drawdown risk controls, volatility targeting, and actively timing rebalancing trades. You will discover how these techniques helped the authors achieve remarkable results during the market drawdown in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and how they can help you protect your assets against unpredictable—but inevitable—future bear markets. Ideal for professionals in the asset management industry, Strategic Risk Management: Designing Portfolios and Managing Risk is a valuable resource for financial policy makers, economics and finance scholars, and anyone with even a passing interest in taking an active role in investing for their future.
A comprehensive framework for assessing strategies for managing risk and uncertainty, integrating theory and practice and synthesizing insights from many fields. This book offers a framework for making decisions under risk and uncertainty. Synthesizing research from economics, finance, decision theory, management, and other fields, the book provides a set of tools and a way of thinking that determines the relative merits of different strategies. It takes as its premise that we make better decisions if we use the whole toolkit of economics and related fields to inform our decision making. The text explores the distinction between risk and uncertainty and covers standard models of decision making under risk as well as more recent work on decision making under uncertainty, with a particular focus on strategic interaction. It also examines the implications of incomplete markets for managing under uncertainty. It presents four core strategies: a benchmark strategy (proceeding as if risk and uncertainty were low), a financial hedging strategy (valuable if there is much risk), an operational hedging strategy (valuable for conditions of much uncertainty), and a flexible strategy (valuable if there is much risk and/or uncertainty). The book then examines various aspects of these strategies in greater depth, building on empirical work in several different fields. Topics include price-setting, real options and Monte Carlo techniques, organizational structure, and behavioral biases. Many chapters include exercises and appendixes with additional material. The book can be used in graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in risk management, as a guide for researchers, or as a reference for management practitioners.
Managing risk in and across organizations has always been of vital importance, both for individual firms and for the globalized economy more generally. With the global financial crisis, a dramatic lesson was learnt about what happens when risk is underestimated, misinterpreted, or even overlooked. Many possible solutions have been competing for international recognition, yet, there is little empirical evidence to support the purported effectiveness of these regulations and structured control approaches, which leaves the field wide open for further interpretation and conceptual development. This comprehensive book pulls together a team of experts from around the world in a range of key disciplines such as management, economics and accounting, to provide a comprehensive resource detailing everything that needs to be known in this emerging area. With no single text currently available, the book fills a much needed gap in our current understanding of strategic risk management, offering the potential to advance research efforts and enhance our approaches to effective risk management practices. Edited by a globally recognized expert on strategic risk management, this book will be an essential reference for students, researchers, and professionals with an interest in risk management, strategic management and finance.
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.
“Shows how humans have brought us to the brink and how humanity can find solutions. I urge people to read with humility and the daring to act.” —Harpal Singh, former Chair, Save the Children, India, and former Vice Chair, Save the Children International In conversations with people all over the world, from government officials and business leaders to taxi drivers and schoolteachers, Blair Sheppard, global leader for strategy and leadership at PwC, discovered they all had surprisingly similar concerns. In this prescient and pragmatic book, he and his team sum up these concerns in what they call the ADAPT framework: Asymmetry of wealth; Disruption wrought by the unexpected and often problematic consequences of technology; Age disparities--stresses caused by very young or very old populations in developed and emerging countries; Polarization as a symptom of the breakdown in global and national consensus; and loss of Trust in the institutions that underpin and stabilize society. These concerns are in turn precipitating four crises: a crisis of prosperity, a crisis of technology, a crisis of institutional legitimacy, and a crisis of leadership. Sheppard and his team analyze the complex roots of these crises--but they also offer solutions, albeit often seemingly counterintuitive ones. For example, in an era of globalization, we need to place a much greater emphasis on developing self-sustaining local economies. And as technology permeates our lives, we need computer scientists and engineers conversant with sociology and psychology and poets who can code. The authors argue persuasively that we have only a decade to make headway on these problems. But if we tackle them now, thoughtfully, imaginatively, creatively, and energetically, in ten years we could be looking at a dawn instead of darkness.
For boards and executives, high-quality and transparent information is critical to allow effective decision-making. Emerging risks are increasingly challenging issues, both in terms of threats and growth opportunities; not least since the science pertaining to these risks tends to be contested. Emerging Risks: A Strategic Management Guide restores the constructive dialogue between the business professional and the expert/scientist community, essential if companies are to anticipate, plan ahead and exploit leading-edge ideas. It provides insights into some of the major emerging risks of the 21st century and then guides organizations on how to approach and manage those risks proactively in the wake of new regulation, governance and enterprise-wide risk management. The topics covered include: nanotechnologies, covering the industrial revolution of the 21st Century; new information and communication technologies (NICT), discussing the infrastructure of the future; electromagnetic fields (EMF) and their debated health impact; chemical substances/REACH, a regulation with major economic and environmental stakes and an example of emerging risk management; biological risk and its on-going need for international surveillance; supply chain, a top management priority; and country risk, for which security and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are growing issues. The authors assess and propose a process for managing emerging risks and the strategies that need to be put in place, drawing on examples of best practice.
Groundbreaking book that redefines risk in business as potentially powerful strategically to help increase profits. Get out of your "defensive crouch": learn which risks to avoid, which to mitigate, and which to actively exploit.
