Risk Management: Avoiding Pitfalls – Did you invest in Webvan back in the 1990s? Or Amazon? If it was the innovative online grocer Webvan, you lost your money. If you invested in Amazon, you cleaned up and got bragging rights.
Both companies started out strong. What happened to Webvan? It didn’t factor in three major business risks into its launch. Amazon, on the other hand, did. Successful businesses expect risk and deal with it sensibly.
How To Spot Risk
How do you, as a business owner, figure out what the risks are to your specific business and industry, how those risks might affect your business and effective ways to handle them? That’s the topic of Fundamentals of Enterprise Risk Management: How Top companies Assess Risk, Manage Exposure and Seize Opportunity, Second Edition – Audio Version.
Author John J. Hampton has collected and analyzed a wide range of case studies, including Apple, IBM, Chase, Microsoft and Sony. Though he looks at risk through the lens of big companies with these studies, his data can help any size business ride through business risks safely, even those wanting to start a turnkey business.
In this extensively revised new edition, he looks at new technologies that help business owners monitor and evaluate risk. He explains advanced apps that make the process easier, including Riskonnect and High Tech Electronic Platform, or HTEP.
You Need a Strategy
One of the helpful strategies he describes is called risk clustering. This helps you get clear on what risks you are facing, figure out specifically how they might impact your business and then come up with ways to handle them. He talks about the importance of your corporate culture, how to analyze it for strengths and weaknesses.
Hampton talks about how to improve communication to minimize risk, how to handle healthcare in your business and ways to spot risks to your intellectual property, which is increasingly important in the digital age.
Fundamentals of Enterprise Risk Management: How Top companies Assess Risk, Manage Exposure and Seize Opportunity, Second Edition – Audio Version, is one of the best books available to help you understand potential risks to your business and to deal with them efficiently.
