Jun 07
27
Star V Conference
I was invited to the dinner last night for the Star V Conference. This is the conference where APEC Region countries look at risk and business continuity.
The after dinner speech was given by John Merkovsky, from Marsh USA. Really fascinating talk and a very interesting guy. I had a chance to talk with him briefly after the dinner. Bear in mind this is a company whose fundamental premise, as an insurer, is to understand risk and insure against it; who consult on this stuff to the World Economic Forum among other things.
He talked about the big challenges in risk being global warming, nuclear proliferation, etc. Then went on to talk about two key issues that are key. One is that companies who look for guidance on these things often miss the critical issue: Reputional Risk. He mentioned a number of case studies including problems that Jamba Juice had prior to their IPO, and how by focusing on the reputational risk they not only solved the problem but also increased sales.
The other big one was the concept that 'threat' and 'risk' are really quite different. By focusing on threats such as global warming, companies can get bogged down in a rat's nest of little things where it is impossible to cover everything. The real issue is where and what the specific risk is. His example was a company that he consults to that has huge quantities of products being shipped via the port of Shanghai and is concerned about impact from global warming on supply chain. They were focusing on the threat of this rather than solving the risk problems.
Really interesting to get a glimpse of another part of the business ecosystem that I don't often look at these days.