During a break today, I was taking a look at the headlines at 680news.com. I most enjoyed the irony in the timing of MoneySense magazine’s announcement that Ottawa-Gatineau was ranked as the best place to live in Canada. Because at the same time, a 3.5-magnitute earthquake stuck the Ottawa Valley area. #FAIL
Physical security (graffiti?) is something that many risk professionals and auditors take seriously. Most organizations issue access cards to their employees, often configured differently to various floors or parts of the office. It’s well known that thieves will sometimes piggy back off someone coming into the office when polite employees hold the door open for strangers who appear to work there. (To mitigate that risk, simply asking “can I help you” will often deter the bad guy.) Alternatively, I’ve seen places install turnstiles in the lobby so only one person can get in at a time. Doors are often configured so…
I never would have predicted that a parent magazine would have been fodder for a risk management post but there it was on the coffee table begging to be read it like an infant crying for attention. It’s not surprising that states and provinces passed laws that ban talking and/or texting for drivers when, as the article notes, “Talking on the phone makes people four times as likely to crash, but texting makes a crash 23 times more likely”. I no longer talk in the car except on the rare occasion when I cannot find my douche bag Bluetooth ear…
A story in the National Post today describes the stats behind a decline of religious affiliation in many countries. A researcher explains: “There’ll be a continuing loss of membership among people who identify themselves as belonging to a religion. Over time, we could reach a time where society is dominated by people who claim religious non-affiliation”. Most businesses have options but not the religion business. If you’re McDonald’s and see a decline in sales of Big Macs because people want healthier food choices you change your menu and give them salads. If you’re GM and see a decline in sales of gas guzzling…
The book by Robert Sutton called The No Asshole Rule was brought to my attention by the blog Managed by Walking Around. I’ve read and enjoyed some of Sutton’s other books including those co-authored by Jeffrey Pfeffer and hope to get to this one shortly. With this in mind, I felt like writing about some of the assholes I’ve had the good fortune of working for in my career. While these assholes made my life miserable thanks to their bullying, harassment and halitosis they also taught me how to be a better manager; I want to lead by being the…
Unable to come up with any St Patrick’s Day risk management-related post, I was going to post a photo of me drinking a Guinness or Karissa Shannon in a green bikini. Guess which one I chose? http://coedmagazine.com/2011/03/17/karissa-shannon-st-patricks-day-beach-bikini-pictures/ (Photo removed, sorry.)
I used to watch Dora the Explorer with my daughter, a cartoon about a “7-year-old girl who embarks on a trip in every episode in order to find something or help somebody”. In every show she consults the map in her backpack, known as Map, who tells Dora how to get to her destination. What I found troubling was that Map always puts our protagonist in harm’s way. Always subjecting her to unnecessary risk. For example, if Dora is trying to get to Grandma’s house or return her library books on time, Map never tells her to walk down that…
I don’t portray myself to be either a statistician or an actuary but I do have the (mis)fortune of having some idea about how probabilities and odds work and often in risk management you have to evaluate the likelihood of things happening. In our everyday lives and business we often fabricate decisions to treat risks when we really don’t know the probabilities associated with the risks nor have a mechanism for measuring them; we pull subjective values out of the air (read: arse) and we do a pretty terrible job at it. Against this backdrop, it’s fun to watch how excited…
While it may appear to be a flagrant act of cross-blog-promotion, here’s Riskview’s brilliant response my post from this week called My appetite for risk and cheesecake. In my piece, I wrote about how my brother wanted to travel to Morocco while protests were going on in the Middle East and how my significant other wanted to drive to Buffalo in advance of a pending snow storm. In both cases, I explained their appetite for risk was greater than mine, but Riskview explains it this way: (My brother and significant other) are not acting irrationally, they are acting according to their own rationality. This…
On a trip to Portugal and Spain last month, my brother elected to take a minor detour and visited Morocco in the midst of “a revolution sweeping the Arab world” as he wrote on his blog. He was monitoring the protests in the other states and determined that despite minor rumblings in Morocco, the coast was clear. The risk was more elevated than it was maybe six months ago, but still within his appetite for risk. I would have exercised a bit more restraint; after all, there were massive protests underway only two doors down in Libya. But this illustrates…
