COVID-19: The Weakness of Traditional Risk Management Strategies
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how vulnerable companies are to systemic risk events — and how limited our normal business risk management approaches are in these situations. In January 2019, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Harvard Global Health Institute published a white paper about how businesses should prepare for a pandemic. It recommended steps […]
What Does COVID-19 Tell Us About Global Business Risk Forecasting?
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual Global Risk Reports get a lot of attention from the business community. In recent years, the prominence of climate change related risks has suggested to many observers that the business community is getting more serious about tackling climate change.The COVID-19 crisis, however, gives us an interesting look into how […]
The Business Response to COVID-19: #Pandemicwishing?
In 2019 Duncan Austin coined the term “greenwishing” to describe environmental and sustainability initiatives with little likelihood of material impact. Does #pandemicwishing now need to join the business risk management vocabulary as well?The COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmed the conventional risk management strategies that companies may have had in place to deal with such an event. That’s because COVID-19 […]
There’s Never Been a Better Time to Deliver Actionable Climate Knowledge
Ten years ago I saw a presentation by the authors of the book Influencer: The Power to Change Anything about the ability of the right information at the right time — actionable knowledge — to influence human decisions. That’s because every human decision is based on the answers to two questions: 1) Is the topic […]
Stop Teaching Students to Equate GHG Emissions Reductions with Business Risk Management
There is a fascinating business and climate change resource at Harvard Business School’s Digital Initiative website. In November 2016, Business School students faced an interesting assignment. Although few details are provided, they had to select a company whose business model was likely to be affected by climate change, describe that impact, and discuss what the company […]