Blend Risk Management in to vital Business Processes

Risks lurk in hidden corners of every business and enterprise. Some such as a rainy day may be ignored because recovery needs no special effort. Others such as a meteorite shower may be ignored for one may not strike during your tenure. Product liability is both serious and likely, but at least it stares you in the face. Nothing can match the ferocity of a grave incident that has not happened for decades or perhaps never before, but ignoring which on hindsight you are hard-pressed to defend.

Reputation is so integral to branding that it brooks not the most indirect of negligence allegation. A disaster may still find a path through all defenses but the stakes justify every conceivable effort. The canvas of possible scenarios is so wide that you need a process to uncover as many as you can and to equip your recovery team in every feasible way.

Benchmarking by the Devil may save the day for you, for lateral thinking can link a seemingly unconnected disaster with a potential and unwelcome visitor to your own back yard. Scan all your news resources and analyze how your recovery teams would react if the adverse events that you read and hear about were by great misfortune, to drop in on you. Near misses are at least as important as the ones with casualties. The latter are not universally tangible, obvious and close in time between cause and effect.

The political truism that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom applies to the assets you shepherd. Set aside resources and strengthen your fortress against attacks from all directions, whether contrived or ordained and pray that it continues to seem such a waste of time!

Communications and logistics seem to be the most overlooked parts during rehearsals and planning for disasters. Do your recovery teams have ready checklists for emergency procedures and are rights to make public statements structured so that people do not feel that you evade? Would your teams have food, water, shelter and protection if a situation lifted them to the eye of a hurricane and how long would they take to get there?

Changes in public perception are so fickle and ethereal at first glance that significant damage may escape your notice as relief in containing the immediate swell lulls you in to complacence. Perhaps like Cesar you need a slave to keep whispering in your ear that there are rumblings you must yet contain from repeat eruption!

The transfer of custody and eventual ownership of goods between your suppliers, your own sites and the downstream chain of logistics, with value addition and processing at each stage, leaves many questions of corporate social responsibility open to social, regulatory and legal interpretation. These could leave you in a bind if you have not prepared to deal comprehensively with the aftermath of sudden developments. What can you do to prevent an approved vendor from deploying child labor? What is a truck driver abandons the site of an accident, leaving your goods subject to hazardous abuse? Are you responsible for safe storage of your products after they are off your official inventory records?

The entire life-cycle of each product must be studied in great detail to safeguard the profits it generates year after year. All people who have roles, even if indirect, must weave effective stewardship in to their contribution to the fabric of the enterprise. Large and diversified groups face special challenges as they delegate routine intricacies to sector experts. The chasm between global standards and local practices in some countries is another dilemma that needs management with great discretion and transparency.

US business of a Japanese auto maker, commented on last month at this site, may be treated as a kind of standard of how commerce and industry can conduct their business with both profit and exemplary corporate social responsibility. Every member of the corporate world can implement systems to further Business Stewardship aims. Such an approach will foster long term sustenance of the business and improve capability to recover from possible and threatening disasters.

Contact drsbanerji@gmail.com or leave a post here if you would like help with a detailed audit of your business operations in light of the concepts outlined in this article.