Lord Voldemort: Risk Manager of the Year

Lord Voldermort would make an excellent risk manager because when he identifies a risk, he assesses it and treats it immediately. Here are a few of my reasons but I welcome additional examples of his risk management in the comment field below.

1. When the young Voldemort (a.k.a Tom Riddle) learns that he was born half-Muggle, he identified this as a high impact reputation risk. After all, you cannot go around hating Mudbloods when your dad was one. To manage this reputation risk he killed his father and grandparents.

2. A prophecy tells Voldemort that a boy born in July will become his enemy. He figures that this boy is either Harry Potter or Neville Longbottom. Voldemort performs the required risk assessment and determines Harry, a half-blood like himself, is the greater threat. Unfortunately, for Voldemort, Harry’s mother was a better risk manager; seeing a threat to her boy she threw herself in front of Voldermort’s killing curse sacrificing herself to save her boy.  

3. Finally, to protect himself from the greatest risk of all, death, Voldemort looked to Horcruxes. A Horcrux is a magical object used to store a piece of your soul. They are not easy to create. One requires knowledge of dark magic, the painful process of splitting one’s soul and murdering someone to make it work. Despite the excruciating pain involved, our Voldemort assessed the risk-return of making these Horcruxes and determined the pain and risk was reasonable. And he didn’t do this just once but seven times. Talk about building redundancy into your risk management plan. 

In hindsight this was a smart move for when trying to kill young Harry his physical body was destroyed, but luckily he had more souls in his various Horcruxes which kept him alive until he could come back.

So what do you think? Risk Manager of the Year?