In the interest of full disclosure, I love Starbucks. I admit that I was a Tim Hortons slave for the last decade but nothing gets me going every morning like my grande bold. (Incidentally, I’d like to thank the barista…
Physical Security and Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door
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…
You don’t deserve to work for an asshole
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…
Roll up the rim to lose and other lotteries
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…
Risk Containment on the risk of servers and poor back up plans
Another great post from RiskContainment called Back Up? What Back Up? about the risk of putting servers in a basement, reminded me of this tale from my past: I once worked for an international securities dealer in Toronto; we had…
Work vs Life II
I wrote a diatribe last year about work-life (im)balance and despite providing employees with tools like connectivity from their home pc, or laptops and BlackBerry devices, managers still do not (really) like employees working from home. There is still a…
Lottery Risk Management
So what happens when you are part of an office lotto pool and win? And what happens when some folks don’t participate the one week the group buys the $50 million ticket? This is just what’s going on in a…
Fantasy football pool risk management
Risk Management Monitor addresses the concern about employees spending hours of company time researching and updating their fantasy football picks. Some argue that it’s disruptive – having fired employees or blocked access to certain websites from the company network –…
Risks of Social Media
Last month when Paris Hilton was busted with 0.8 grams of cocaine in her Chanel purse, she defended herself by saying she borrowed the bag from a friend and it wasn’t her coke either. Sadly, the poor little heiress posted a…
Work vs Life
In a departure from my usual diatribes about risk management, I had some thoughts on work-life (im)balance. Some argue that work-life balance is a misnomer. I read it should be called work-life management since there never is a balance. The…