Risk Management Quotes

You don't have to believe in coincidences because they happen every day. The trick is to be able to discern when something is more than coincidence. ~ Glenn Jones

Corporate brand, culture, knowledge, and risk management are all boardroom concerns. ~ Pearl Zhu

Technology trust is a good thing, but control is a better one. ~ Stephane Nappo

Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense ~ Henry Mintzberg

A problem never exists in isolation; it is surrounded by other problems in space and time. The more of the context of a problem that a scientist can comprehend, the greater are his chances of finding a truly adequate solution. ~ Russell L. Ackoff

Metaphorically, governance is like a "Steer," Risk Management is like a "Brake. ~ Pearl Zhu

While we cannot accurately predict the course of climate change in the coming decades, the risks we run if we don't change our course are enormous. Prudent risk management does not equate uncertainty with inaction. ~ Steven Chu

Let me simplify my take on intervention. To me it is mostly about having a systematic protocol to determine when to intervene and when to leave systems alone. And we may need to intervene to control the iatrogenics of modernity - particularly the large-scale harm to the environment and the concentration of potential (though not yet manifested) damage, the kind of thing we only notice when it is too late. The ideas advanced here are not political, but risk-management based. I do not have a political affiliation or allegiance to a specific party; rather, I am introducing the idea of harm and fragility into the vocabulary so we can formulate appropriate policies to ensure we don't end up blowing up the planet and ourselves. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The question of whether or to what extent human activities are causing global warming is not a matter of ideology, let alone of belief. The issue is simply one of risk management. ~ Malcolm Turnbull

Among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute belief that the solutions to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organized expertise ... The reality is that our problems are largely the product of that application. ~ Voltaire

In a world where every choice is an investment, growing up becomes a very complex exercise in risk management. ~ Malcolm Harris

Managing risk is very different from managing strategy. Risk management focuses on the negative-threats and failures rather than opportunities and successes. ~ Robert S. Kaplan

Risk is just an expensive substitute for information. ~ Adrian Slywotzky

Given the central role of effective, firmwide risk management in maintaining strong financial institutions, it is clear that supervisors must redouble their efforts to help organizations improve their risk-management practices ... We are also considering the need for additional or revised supervisory guidance regarding various aspects of risk management, including further emphasis on the need for an enterprise-wide perspective when assessing risk. ~ Ben Bernanke

Two resources, largely untapped in American organizations, are potential information and employee creativity ~ William Hunter

Stronger regulation and supervision aimed at problems with underwriting practices and lenders' risk management would have been a more effective and surgical approach to constraining the housing bubble than a general increase in interest rates. ~ Ben Bernanke

Chemical manufacturers are responsible for reporting any potential problems they discover about these products. This makes Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chemical risk management dependent on information volunteered by industry, and industry has little incentive to look for damning problems or to disclose all it knows. ~ Nena Baker

The benefits provided by worker participation are twofold. Quality is improved because of the finding and fixing of a very large number of problems, but also, and perhaps equally important, moral is improved. ~ George E.P. Box

Banks have come to realize in the recent crisis that they are paying the price for having designed compensation packages which provide incentives that are not, in the long run, in the interests of the banks themselves, and I would like to think that would change. ~ Mervyn King

Most of the time, your risk management works. With a systemic event such as the recent shocks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, obviously the risk-management system of any one bank appears, after the fact, to be incomplete. We ended up where banks couldn't liquidate their risk, and the system tended to freeze up. ~ Myron Scholes

Thoughtfully assessing and addressing enterprise risk and placing a high value on corporate transparency can protect the one thing we cannot afford to lose: trust. ~ Dale E. Jones

The budget evolved from a management tool into an obstacle to management. ~ Frank Carlucci

Business is the force of change. Business is essential to solving the climate crisis, because this is what business is best at: innovating, changing, addressing risks, searching for opportunities. There is no more vital task ~ Richard Branson

As population susceptibilities are better understood, we will be in a better position than we are in today to make informed decisions about risk management. ~ Samuel Wilson

To copy is to invite disaster. ~ W. Edwards Deming

You want a valve that doesn't leak and you try everything possible to develop one. But the real world provides you with a leaky valve. You have to determine how much leakiness you can tolerate. ~ Arthur Rudolph

We live in a blatantly corrupt world and smart people engage in the wise practice of risk management. ~ Steven Magee

There are three ways to get better figures ... Improve the system ... Distort the system ... Distort the figures ~ Brian L. Joiner

Genuinely intelligence-led operations have to be embedded into both processes and more importantly mindsets to bridge the gaps in Risk Management. ~ Pearl Zhu

Where's the fun in playing with knives if you can't draw a little blood? ~ Donald Gorman

Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia. ~ Dee Hock

If you have an approach that makes money, then money management can make the difference between success and failure ... I try to be conservative in my risk management. I want to make sure I'll be around to play tomorrow. Risk control is essential. ~ Monroe Trout

Green light, STOP - if you want to see where you are taking the most risk, look where you are making the most money. ~ Paul Gibbons

It's better to solve the right problem approximately than to solve the wrong problem exactly. ~ John Tukey

I agree with a lot of the points in Taleb's book, but I don't agree with many of his conclusions. It seems to me that he rightly points out that risk managers miss a lot of the risks, but the conclusion is that he draws, is that we should abandon risk management, whereas my conclusion is we should improve it. ~ Robert F. Engle

To be a leader in this new economy, you have to love risk-which means patterning your life on the heroic, not on the strategic. Acting boldly is better than acting knowingly. ~ Harriet Rubin

A study of project and risk management in software projects in the public sector found that an informal partnership between the project's business owner and the project manager was seen by the latter as providing more effective project proprietorship and governance than the project steering committee [1]. This suggests that the application of governance may be more important than its form. This paper, however, focuses only on formal and explicit governance ~ Anonymous

Love might be a risk, but I'm all about risk-management. ~ J.A. Huss

Maybe we should teach schoolchildren probability theory and investment risk management. ~ Andrew Lo

You cannot manage risk, or for that matter, build a risk management capability without first understanding the "business value of risk management. ~ Pearl Zhu

In financial services, if you want to be the best in the industry, you first have to be the best in risk management and credit quality. It's the foundation for every other measure of success. There's almost no room for error. ~ John G. Stumpf

Successful problem solving requires finding the right solution to the right problem. We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem. ~ Russell L. Ackoff

Risk managers and investment bankers and actually, all kinds of investors took on more risk than they expected. So there was a failure of risk management. There was a failure to recognize how much risk there was in some of these securities that people bought. ~ Robert F. Engle

I have a right to be blind sometimes. ~ Horatio Nelson

My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes. ~ Michael Lewis

There is no doubt that Formula 1 has the best risk management of any sport and any industry in the world. ~ Jackie Stewart

A foreign policy aimed at the achievement of total security is the one thing I can think of that is entirely capable of bringing this country to a point where it will have no security at all. ~ George F. Kennan

The technical explanation is that the market-sensitive risk models used by thousands of market participants work on the assumption that each user is the only person using them. ~ Avinash Persaud

I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in financial history. ~ Niall Ferguson

A theory's assumptions always are and ought to be unrealistic. Further, we should attempt to make them more unrealistic in order to increase a theory's fruitfulness. ~ Satoshi Kanazawa

You live in a grim universe."
"That's risk management for you. ~ Max Gladstone

Managers must have the discipline not to keep pulling up the flowers to see if their roots are healthy. ~ Robert Townsend

One thing that makes it possible to be an optimist is if you have a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose. ~ Randy Pausch

If you spend more than 13 minutes analyzing economic and market forecasts, you've wasted 10 minutes ~ Peter Lynch

Not taking risks one doesn't understand is often the best form of risk management. ~ Raghuram G. Rajan

The thing is, continuity of strategic direction and continuous improvement in how you do things are absolutely consistent with each other. In fact, they're mutually reinforcing. ~ Michael Porter

It is far better to do the right thing wrong than to do the wrong thing right. ~ Russell L. Ackoff

Enron followed the unwise practice of paying bonuses based on forecasted profits, not actual cash flows, a system that posed a problem remarkably similar to the R&D issues Gluck and his colleagues had solved at Northern Electric years earlier. In short: You can forecast anything. Delivering actual results is a different story. The emphasis on forecasts also neutralized Enron's so-called risk-management group, which became a shrinking violet in the face of ever more outrageous estimates. ~ Duff McDonald

By definition, risk-takers often fail. So do morons. In practice it's difficult to sort them out. ~ Scott Adams

We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition ~ William Gibson

Risk management is a more realistic term than safety. It implies that hazards are ever-present, that they must be identified, analyzed, evaluated and controlled or rationally accepted. ~ Jerome F. Lederer

From my perspective, it's really risk management to ensure that humans have the ability to go somewhere else in case there were to be some huge disaster on Earth. ~ Gwynne Shotwell

relationships between debtors and creditors brokered or 'intermediated' by increasingly numerous institutions called banks. The core function of these institutions was now information gathering and risk management. ~ Niall Ferguson

We gauge risk literally hundreds of times per day, usually well and often subconsciously. We start assessing risk before the disaster even happens. We are doing is right now. We decide where to live and what kind of insurance to buy, just like we process all kinds of everyday risks: we wear bike helmets, or not. We buckle our seatbelts, smoke cigarettes, and let our kids stay out until midnight. Or not. ~ Amanda Ripley

Boundaries and risk management are very important parts of living a healthy and positive life. ~ Bryant McGill

The purpose of risk management is to improve the future, not to explain the past. ~ Andrew Jaquith

Some risks that are thought to be unknown, are not unknown. With some foresight and critical thought, some risks that at first glance may seem unforeseen, can in fact be foreseen. Armed with the right set of tools, procedures, knowledge and insight, light can be shed on variables that lead to risk, allowing us to manage them. ~ Daniel Wagner

Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. ~ Donella H. Meadows

One of the main cyber-risks is to think they don't exist. The other is to try to treat all potential risks.

Fix the basics, protect first what matters for your business and be ready to react properly to pertinent threats. Think data, but also business services integrity, awareness, customer experience, compliance, and reputation. ~ Stephane Nappo

Being able to be repeated controllably
is one key element in risk management. ~ Toba Beta

Housing prices had never before fallen as far and as fast as they did beginning in 2007. But that's what happened. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan explained to a congressional committee after the fact, "The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of [2007] because the data input into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria. Had instead the models been fitted more appropriately to historic periods of stress, capital requirements would have been much higher and the financial world would be in far better shape, in my judgment."3 ~ Charles Wheelan

Ideal online reputation isn't something that can be earned by accident. ~ CR Risk Advisory

We tend to think that, in a traditional organisation, people are producing results because management wants results, but the essence of a high-quality organisation is people producing results because they want the results. It's puzzling we find that hard to understand, that if people are really enjoying, they'll innovate, they'll take risks, they'll have trust with one another because they are really committed to what they're doing and it's fun ~ Peter Senge

The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns. ~ Benjamin Graham

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty! ~ Douglas Adams

If you only take small risks, you are only entitled to a small life. ~ Robin Sharma

At Berkshire, I both initiate and monitor every derivatives contract on our books ... If Berkshire ever gets in trouble, it will be my fault. It will not be because of the misjudgments made by a risk committee or chief risk officer. ~ Warren Buffett

The essence of risk management lies in maximizing the areas where we have some control over the outcome while minimizing the areas where we have absolutely no control over the outcome. ~ Peter L. Bernstein

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) involves viewing risk holistically and horizontally across an organization. Both insurable and non-insurable risks are identified across all facets and disciplines of an entity, with the objective to eliminate, ameliorate or transfer such risks - or prepare to accept them. ~ Al Decker

The mistake ... was attributed in part to the fact that employees called the 3-year note 'Losh' and the 5-year note 'Bosh'. The comic mixing of 'Loshes' and 'Boshes' sounded more like a Dr. Seuss children's book than a cutting-edge risk-management operation. ~ Frank Partnoy

If you don't invest in risk management, it doesn't matter what business you're in, it's a risky business. ~ Gary Cohn

We have good leadership only by chance, not by management.

And we need to change that! ~ Amit Chatterjee

A performance dashboard is a practical tool to improve management effectiveness and efficiency, not just a pretty retrospective picture in an annual report. ~ Pearl Zhu

Management manages by making decisions and by seeing that those decisions are implemented. ~ Harold S. Geneen

When a man learns to love, he must bear the risk of hatred. ~ Masashi Kishimoto

The value of taking risks through all stages of life is constant ... it's the excuses that change. ~ Rik Leaf

If those of us in positions of responsibility fail to do everything in our power to protect the right of privacy, we risk something far more valuable than money. We risk our way of life ... Fortunately, technology gives us the tools to avoid these risks. It is my sincere hope that by using them and by working together, we will. ~ Tim Cook

For a start, the salary begins to have an attraction and addictiveness all of its own. A regular paycheck and crack cocaine have that in common. In addition, and more to the point, working too long for other people can blunt your desire to take risks. This last factor is crucial, because the ability to live with and embrace risk is what sets apart the financial winners and losers in the world. ~ Felix Dennis

Boys hijacked by hormones don't really think, they chase. They see risk and consequences as if through the wrong end of a telescope: smaller and pushed far away. ~ Charles M. Blow

In abandoning the understanding that things - services, goods, wars, and houses - have costs, we risk becoming infantilised, incapable of making decisions about government or finance, and perhaps above all about the environment, the wellbeing of the planet upon which we depend and which our children will inherit from us. ~ Nick Harkaway

Work-life balance. This is another touchstone of supposedly "enlightened" management practices that can be insulting to smart, dedicated employees. The phrase itself is part of the problem: For many people, work is an important part of life, not something to be separated. The best cultures invite and enable people to be overworked in a good way, with too many interesting things to do both at work and at home. ~ Eric Schmidt

Life is Time Management and then you're dead. ~ V. Vale

The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You no more have the right to risk others by failing to vaccinate than you do by sending your child to school with a hunting knife. Vaccination isn't a private choice but a civic obligation. ~ Nicholas Kristof

He who know most grieves most for wasted time. ~ Dante Alighieri

My willingness to explore and work freely is not without risk, and at times, I find myself caught in a bind ... Knowing I can fix whatever goes wrong allows me to paint, not without thought, but without hesitation. ~ Brian Johnson

You can't manage time, you actually only manage what you do during time. So the management issue is not so much about time, it's more about how do you manage your focus, how do you manage your actions and your activities in terms of what you do. ~ David Allen

There was a period just after the inevitability of ruin hove into view and just before it smashed into the hull of your life that was the closest to pure freedom anybody got. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Before hoarding became a phenomenon, people just called it "collecting" or "being nostalgic." I don't hoard, exactly, but I get it. It's a response to our need and desire for purpose, order, definition, and a fortress. It's a calling that requires constant management, control, and obsessive attention. I am amassing artifacts from the history of me. My garage is the storeroom and temporary exhibition hall of the yet-to-be-built museum documenting the rise and fall of the Marc Age. I am the curator. I decide the meaning and worth of the collection based on my feelings in a moment. ~ Marc Maron

Most people, when they meet me, one of the first things they say is, 'Why would you voluntarily subject yourself to war? Why would you go into these places where you know there's a risk of getting killed?' ~ Lynsey Addario