I would like to hear some of the more creative answers to this question. Please post your comments.
However, the correct answer is that Tiger Woods and the Global Risk Community are both in Melbourne this weekend. Woods was part of the winning American team playing at Royal Melbourne Golf Course today in the President's Cup.
The Global Risk Community is attending the RMIA Asia Pacific Conference in Melbourne also. The event was launched this evening by Sharon Aitken, RMIA President - to the largest gathering of risk managers in Australia this year.
For those not attending in person, we will post updates each day - including interviews with the keynote speakers.
Peter.
Comments
Thanks for those who have waded into murky territory - maybe a water hazard - for risk managers trying to rationalise the behaviours of celebrities.
I will be shortly posting the wrap of Day 1 at the RMIA conference here in Melbourne. It was a great day and lots of fascinating insights, case studies, presentations and discussion forums.
The only place you can find either one is Australia.
Lately it seems no one cares about either one.
So well said in such a few words! Congratulations Beulah!
Maybe tongue in cheek:- Both tigers need to constantly navigate their way through the risks in the woods. Both tigers have nature and humans as a significant threat. Both tigers seem to lack the ability to determine their risk appetite and tolerance for human thereby risking extinction.
Product Contamination–the Tiger Woods affect
Archive Article
“We estimate that in the days beginning with Tiger Woods’ recent car accident and ending with
his announced “indefinite leave” from golf, shareholders of companies that Mr. Woods endorses
lost $5-12 billion in wealth.”
http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/knittel/papers/Tiger_latest.pdf
The perpetual requirement for any company, especially those with a strong commercial brand association or derived income from public opinion, is the identification and management of stakeholders. The priority of communication can be readily identified with a simple x and y chart that apportions values for the level of interest and influence any group or individual may hold with your brand/company. For example, a stakeholder (media, investor, regulator, consumer, etc) with a very high level of interest in your brand, product, processes or return on their interest and is likely to know most things that occur relative to your success of failures. If that same entity has a high level of influence in your operations or the communications specific to your company, they will invariably be one of your highest needs when developing holding statements, pre-emptive advisories or response to publicly circulated content. Communicate with this group, quickly, sincerely and frequently and as a matter of priority. For those with less interest and influence, they will still get your message but at a time more appropriate to their weightage. Do not however underestimate the cumulative or cohort potential of this group should they surge to become a much more credible element should an issue of high emotional (mothers on issues affecting their children, unions), financial (investors or sponsors) or consumption (consumer groups; inclusive of the media) value rapidly circulate among one or all of your associated stakeholder elements.
Information time to market is (in contemporary terms) all but instantaneous, even if you are not! It is therefore imperative that a degree of preparation be conducted for all companies, big or small. It is a folly for any company to operate with this knowledge and not have a process or service to continuously monitor the myriad of available networks that introduce or perpetuate content that could adversely affect your value proposition. This is only part of the preparation required, as any time spent on planning or preparations established before demand presents, will pay dividends well beyond their establishment value. For this you need a number of holding statements, media release, stakeholder communications and the like. This is further supported with a detailed, rehearsed and timely escalation protocol that allows you to identify, analyse, adapt and respond to applicable situations that invariably require customization as you can’t always predict the nature and theme of every issue in advance. You could of course ignore this totally and rely on your response only capacity but as they say “prevention is always better than the cure”, cheaper too!
Where Tiger, and many individuals and companies before him went wrong; despite the sizable investment and earnings capacity associated with his personable brand (especially since it appears to have been substantiated on a pious and family friendly ethos) was apparently to invest only in a response, albeit weak, without preparation and substance. You get what you pay for essentially. I personally could not care less about what he or any other athlete, actor; media personality does outside of their chosen expertise/profession. However, there are plenty that do and it sells.
The net result of the information storm that has ensued has t
Peter, thanks for keeping us aware of the Melbourne event.
As for "more creative answer", and if you allow me a bit of philosophy/psychology, it's interesting to notice how this gentleman, Tiger Woods, summarizes in one person all the challenges of risk management. Think of what is the most threatening to a golf champion: needless to say you need to be a "winner", but by definition, a winner, is someone overfocused, upset by victory. If this type of person misses a shot, his first reflex is to "try and try again" and, as a consequence, loose many points. So the winning golfer is a "winner" who can master his own pulsion towards victory. Doesn't that ring a bell? All these "great traders", who certainly have exceptional talent - not a matter of discussion - but who have been wiped out some day because they didn't know how to step off when the game was escaping their control (LTCM, Amaranth, etc. the list is rather long).
Bit the story isn't finished, and here we are more in psychology than in philosophy. Tiger Woods is indeed one of these very rare champions who are also able of impressive self-control - one of the reasons that made him #1 - but a man is a man. Put a tiger in the trunk of a Ferrari to make it win the race. At some point, the tiger, a beautifully regular winning mechanics, needs to breath and there comes the black swan - sexual in Tiger's case. When a tiger is confined inside a trunk (whatever the way, or whatever you name it, Tiger was emprisoned in a wonderful gentlemanistic image which left no room for the human being), the "black swan" is not a small probability event, it's an almost 100% probability one, one day or another. Some quants give a mathematical interpretation: toss a biased coin with odds 99%-1%. If you do it a few times, you'll most probably see heads all the time, but if you do it many times, the probability of seeing a tail at some point is close to 100% (related to "St Petersburg paradox"). But for me it's way beyond the pure mathematical observation: all sport coaches know that the biggest ennemy of a champion is himself. I'm French and I remember Zidane's "faux pas" during the final of 2006 Soccer World Cup against Italy that cost the cup to France (Zidane is probably another example of, these very rare champions).
On the moral aspect of the story (which is not the core topic of my comment), as you understood, I'll be the least one to blame a great champion for whatever misconduct, if one doesn't blame as well the surrounding who emprisoned him/her inside an unbearable rigid suit.
But the risk management lesson is much more interesting. These great champions and great traders do deserve immense respect, but also need protection against themselves. And believe me this task is probably one of the most difficult ones. How to accompany the champ without atering his intuition while protecting the downside? To all those who think that "lack of comprehensiveness" is a desired feature of risk management, here is the answer, without of course confusing "understanding" and "laxism".
Peter let me thank you again for giving me the opportunity of this digression by letting Tiger Woods enter the discussion on risk management.
Failure to include risk based continunity plan into day-to-day activitives in an increasingly risk filled global business environment can destroy the brand so carefully created and developed over years of hard work. Trusted counsel from those who advise the client and who do so from arms length in an objective manner can add tremendous value to the enterprise. However, those at the top must empower that kind of introspective counsel AND utilize it to avoid events that lurk around the corners and over the horizons. The biggest risks may in fact be from within!
Unpredictable?