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Top 10 Global Risks Underscore Business Concerns

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Risk managers around the world appear to be closely aligned when it comes to top concerns for their organization, according to findings of two studies.

One was preliminary results of a study, Global Risk Management Research, which is due in September by Accenture. Executives from 446 organizations across eight industries were asked what they see as the biggest risks over the next two years. Out of a list of 10 “external pressures,” legal risks topped the chart at 62%. Second on the list were business risks at 52%, and third were regulatory requirements at 49%.

There was a tie at 46% between the fifth, sixth and seventh concerns, which were credit risks, operational risks and strategic risks.

Interestingly, the 2013 Global Risk Management Survey by Aon Risk Solutions found that of 1,415 respondents from 70 countries and a broad range of industry sectors, the top concern was economic slowdown/slow recovery. Second was regulatory/legislative changes and third was increasing competition.

Last on the Accenture study’s list was reputational risk at 38%. I find this surprising, given the financial crisis and ongoing examples of tarnished reputations over the past few years for a variety of reasons. The Aon study, however, listed damage to reputation as the fourth concern.

In a slowly recovering economic environment, with more and more organizations merging and acquiring other companies, and expanding across the globe, the top concerns of both of these studies make sense. In fact, other surveys and experts I’ve talked to indicate that M&As more often than not result in legal actions and trigger other business risks and regulatory requirements.


Illustration courtesy of Accenture

Protecting the Enterprise Against Unconventional Competitive Social Risks

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Today’s “social age” has brought many changes to the corporate world and increased the competitive threats enterprises have to deal with on an ongoing basis. Traditionally, competition has been upfront and direct with open head-to-head strategies to win customers and market share. But as the world approaches a complete “digital state” the competitive tactics against corporations have never been more threatening or aggressive.

As disruptive, non-traditional business competitors emerge, many of these organizations are adopting tactics that would typically be “off limits” to traditional corporations, including partnering with activist groups to attack and disrupt the market leader to damage the reputation and erode the financial state of the organization.

Many enterprises are no longer simply looking to compete, but actually to protect their operations against the disruptive, aggressive forces these non-traditional competitors are partnering with. To combat these unconventional tactics, traditional corporations are turning to real-time advanced social intelligence to receive deep, multidimensional insight on the tactics and actions.

Disruptive Forces

With the proliferation of social media channels and mobile technology, competition for corporations is no longer limited to large, traditional competitors. Technology has allowed a generation of young entrepreneurs to compete with the proverbial Goliath, and quite effectively in many cases. However, in order to gain a competitive foothold in the battle for market share, many small, aggressive companies are targeting their colossal, traditional counterparts across the open social universe, engaging a variety of tactics. The objectives of these emerging competitors are often to dramatically disrupt the market and its leaders and to damage, if not destroy their financial state and reputations.

One example of these emerging disruptors is SodaStream, which is targeting the 178-year-old U.S. carbonated beverage industry with their home soda machines. The company’s focus is to completely disrupt the traditional soda beverage market by convincing consumers to make their own carbonated beverages at home. One of SodaStream’s major tactics is to focus on their product’s elimination of plastic bottles, which they target as an environmental threat.

Creating Disruption with Activists

To maximize this strategic disruption, SodaStream opted to partner with Alex Bogusky, the former co-chairman of ad agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, which ironically designed and developed ads for Coke Zero during his tenure. Now an activist against the beverage industry, Bogusky is known for developing widespread activist campaigns against the carbonated beverage industry for health and environmental causes.

As an example of his work, Bogusky has developed viral videos, like one entitled “Real Bears” that chastises his former client, Coca-Cola, using their iconic polar bears to make statements on the health effects, like diabetes and high blood pressure, of soda consumption. Bogusky distributed these videos with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a self-described non-profit watchdog and consumer advocacy group focusing on nutritional education and awareness. To date his “Real Bears” video has had over 2.2 million views on YouTube.

SodaStream turned to Bogusky to create their 2013 Super Bowl ad targeting soda manufacturers for the amount of plastic bottles they produce. The ad directly attacks the beverage industry’s market leaders with exploding bottles as consumers use SodaStream’s product, saying, “With SodaStream, we could have saved 500 million bottles on gameday alone.” While one SodaStream ad submission was aired, another that directly showed Coca-Cola and Pepsi was rejected by CBS.

Bogusky’s activism approach delivers SodaStream a direct, aggressive channel that many traditional competitors do not employ. Bogusky also affords SodaStream the opportunity to leverage his extensive, sympathetic social network, which features a wide array of activists targeting a variety causes against the beverage industry’s leading providers, ranging from portion size, bottle elimination and sugars to soda taxes and an array of health issues. This network spans activists and advocates across the media, academic, health and corporate sectors, which Bogusky leverages to bring further pressure against the beverage market’s leaders, providing a greater advantage for SodaStream. This direct, aggressive approach poses a huge financial risk for the market leaders who have been battling for carbonated beverage industry supremacy for nearly half a century.

Unveiling the Activist Network

Half the challenge of mitigating risk is having the ability to identify it. The complexity of these competitive forces can be very challenging to pinpoint and understand. However, as companies are now faced with the critical need to gain insight into these new types of veiled, aggressive competitive threats, more enterprises are turning to advanced social intelligence to identify, map and track these threats both individually and collectively to help guide their strategic direction and decisions.

Mapping the activist partners of SodaStream unveils a massive “stealth” network that is often, knowingly or unknowingly, supporting the efforts against SodaStream’s competitors. The example below unveils Bogusky’s massive sympathetic activist network focused on damaging the reputation and financial state of beverage industry leaders, which provides a collective reach to tens of millions of consumers to distribute their damaging messages.

Despite their differing focuses, most of these individual activists share a common objective to damage, or even destroy the major providers of carbonated beverages, which is an objective they share with SodaStream.

Achieving Advanced Competitive Intelligence

Corporations are no longer faced with only traditional, direct competitors. Rather, companies have to understand the emerging disruptive competitors that will often join forces with individual aggressive activists and their massive sympathetic networks to damage their business, engaging unconventional tactics to disrupt industries that have traditionally been unmovable.

To gain this type of advanced insight on a corporation’s disruptive competitors and the activists who may be working in concert to damage them, the organization needs the ability to filter, classify and analyze billions of daily open social discussions to extract invaluable on-going insight. This insight delivers multidimensional competitive views previously unavailable to the corporation to drive strategic decision-making. It is not always effective enough for corporations to rely on simplistic keyword lists and basic tools that “listen” to narrow samples of the social landscape. To manage the widespread financial and reputational threats, the enterprise has to process the entire open social universe, using measure that includes sophisticated “big data” processing tools and analysis from digital media experts.

This advanced social intelligence facilitates proactive planning and strategic response to effectively combat these competitive forces, allowing businesses to protect themselves and their employees, their market share and even their industry itself.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

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Last week I wrote about a train derailment on the line I take to work every day. It was the third derailment in only a few months for the MTA. It turns out that two sets of tracks were destroyed as the result of a derailment of 10 cars on a CSX train hauling garbage at night.

The MTA responded promptly and by the next morning had plans in place, using buses and a subway line to get people to work in Manhattan. That was a Friday, and by Monday garbage had been removed from the tracks and one track was replaced so that service could mostly be restored. The second track was back a few days later.

But a recent letter to the editor of our local newspaper gave the incident a new perspective.

The reader pointed out that a CSX garbage train makes a trip four times each day to and from the Bronx, through Albany, to Virginia.

He stated, “The garbage is loaded next door to two gas-fired electric generating plants,” and pointed out that “every advanced country is converting garbage to gas for electric production – we are not.” Instead, we are hauling it to faraway locales to be placed in landfills.

Randy Leonard wrote in a column for The New York Times in September 2012 that strides have been made with a process called plasma arc gasification, developed by the U.S. Air Force. The gasification process was designed as an alternative to the open pit burns of garbage that some Iraq and Afghanistan veterans claim made them sick.

He noted that David Robau, an environmental scientist for the Air Force, “tours the country promoting a system that sounds too good to be true: It devours municipal garbage, recycles metals, blasts toxic contaminants and produces electricity and usable byproducts — all with drastic reductions in emissions.”

New York City and some waste companies are interested in the process, which is favored by some because it can destroy medical waste, asbestos, hydrocarbons and PCBs, he said.

Robau added that not all environmentalists are convinced, believing that complete disposal of waste will discourage recycling and development of renewable products. They also feel that gasification will still create toxic substances such as dioxins.

David Wolman reported in Wired Magazine, February 2012 that a huge garbage operation in Northern Oregon has included a plasma gasification facility. It is run by a startup company called S4 Energy Solutions – the first commercial plant in the U.S. to use the process to convert household garbage into gas products like hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The products can be burned as fuel or sold for other industrial applications.

So far gasification has not taken off, because the value of the product has yet to offset the energy required to power the high temperature furnaces needed to melt the trash. But I have faith (fingers crossed) that eventually solutions to many of the issues at hand will be found.

After all, garbage is cheap fuel.

As open land gets scarce and water tables are threatened, we will realize that capping landfills is not a long-term solution. Fossil fuels will also become too expensive, making that cheap fuel look better and better. In fact, I predict that we will eventually be mining garbage out of our landfills.

It’s only a matter of time.

Buyers Dealing with Rise in Total Cost of Risk

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Keeping insurance costs down is a priority for risk managers, but with the total cost of risk up 5% since last year, according to the newly released RIMS Benchmark Survey, this task has become increasingly difficult. One risk manager at a live web event last week said he is looking closely for coverage overlaps in his international operations.

A key finding of the 2013 RIMS Benchmark Survey, released this month, was that the average total cost of risk (TCOR) for all companies increased 5%, from $10.19 per ,000 of revenue to $10.70 per $1,000 of revenue – the result of hard market conditions.

The drivers of these increases were global catastrophes, including the tsunami/earthquake in Japan, flooding in Australia and Thailand, and earthquakes in New Zealand and Turkey – which impacted property rates, explained Wesley DuPont, executive vice president and general counsel at Allied World.

On the casualty side, “There has been an uptick in loss severity,” DuPont said. “Claims that had previously settled for less than $5 million were settling for more than $5 million.”

Danny Holtsclaw, director of risk and insurance for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said he is working to keep the cost of risk down by examining duplication of coverage globally. “There has to be an internal review on the risk manager’s side to make sure we don’t have overlapping coverage and if we do, we try to minimize that as much as possible,” he said.

He is also “getting back to the basics of loss control,” by doing “what we do best internally to mitigate the risks we have.” But at the same time, “as our premiums and our cost of risk are growing, we’re looking to our risk partners – not only our carriers, but also our brokers.”

Despite all efforts to evaluate exposures for accuracy, however, at renewal time underwriters are requesting “better data.” Meanwhile, Holtsclaw said, “I’m giving the best data I have, but it’s still not enough.”

What’s more, at midyear renewals, “if you’re adding particular exposures, there seems to be more supervisory underwriting review,” he said, adding that “Sometimes a handshake is not necessarily a handshake – you have to wait for validation to come back. I’m seeing that for the first time in the last year.

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Bobby Bowden, executive vice president, marketing and communications with Allied World said that risk managers can get a better response from insurers by having thorough knowledge of their business and industry. “To come in and know your business inside-out gives us a better understanding,” he said. Better understanding allows the underwriter to price properly, “and ultimately the best deal is the result of that communication,” he added.

What Holtsclaw looks for from carriers is, “for those experts to become an added extension of my team, to help implement our risk management goals.

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” Because at the end of the day, “I’m having to do more with less and I’m trying to take advantage of those resources.”

Companies with advanced enterprise risk programs are proving to have an advantage, said Carol Fox, director for strategic and enterprise risk practice for RIMS. “We found a correlation in a study we did a number of years ago, that companies with better ERM programs had better credit ratings.

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So it’s not just the insurance piece, but making the organization more efficient overall and protecting the value of the organization.”