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Four Industry Luminaries Inducted into Risk Management Hall of Fame at RIMS 2012

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Last year at the RIMS 2011 Annual Conference & Exhibition in Vancouver, RIMS and Chartis launched the Risk Management Hall of Fame. John Pinner, Eldrich Carr, Douglas Barlow, Donald Barrett  and Cheri Hawkins were the first five inductees. Today, they were joined by four others who have spent their lives and careers advancing the discipline: Marc Darby, David Haight, Edith Lichota and Ronald Strine.

“With nearly 150 combined years in the risk management profession, this year’s group of inductees have achieved professional excellence while demonstrating a genuine commitment to advancing the discipline,” said RIMS Executive Director Mary Roth. “It is with great honor that we recognize the careers of these four individuals and welcome them into this elite group.”

Peter Eastwood, president and CEO of Chartis for the Americas, agreed. “This year’s inductees have not only served their companies, but have helped shape the risk management discipline,” he said, “and we are proud to congratulate them on this achievement.”

Below are some highlights from each of their careers.

Marc Darby

Marc Darby’s career at Bombardier spanned almost 30 years before he retired in 1998 as director of risk management and insurance. He increased the profile of the risk manager at the company and helped form a multi-discipline risk management team as Bombardier evolved from a manufacturer of recreational vehicles to a world-leader in the aerospace and rail transit industry. Marc was the president of RIMS from 1983-84, president of Quebec Risk and Insurance Management Association (QRIMA) from 1975-76, winner of the RIMS Harry and Dorothy Goodell Award in 1997 and named to the Business Insurance Risk Management Honor Roll in 1992. He remains an active member of RIMS and QRIMA.

David R. Haight

Before retiring in 1998, David R. Haight has spent more than 35 years as a risk professional at companies including Gould Inc., Ceco Corporation and CF Industries, Inc. He helped form the Northeastern Illinois Chapter of RIMS in 1978 and later served as president. He also served a term as president of the Minnesota Chapter. He was an active RIMS member from 1964-98 and now holds an honorary membership with the organization.

Edith F. Lichota (1929 – 1994)

Edith Lichota began her risk management career in the mid-1960s with a small company in western Ohio, Work Wear, tackling product liability litigation issues. In the 1970s, as assistant treasurer of Carborundum Corp. she fought against the New York State Insurance Department Regulations that would have limited corporations’ risk financing options. In the early 1980s, Ms. Lichota became vice president of government affairs with INA, during which time she supported development of the then-new captive law in Vermont. In 1987, she became the first woman ever named “Risk Manager of the Year” by Business Insurance, one year after having been named “Woman of the Year” by the Association of Professional Insurance Women. Before she passed away in 1994, she also won the highest awards handed out by RIMS, the RIMS Richard W. Bland Memorial Award, and the RIMS Harry and Dorothy Goodell Award.

Ronald E. Strine

Ronald Strine retired from Aetna Life & Casualty in 1992 after 26 years of service, 14 as senior casualty underwriter for Fortune 500 companies and 12 as the director of corporate risk management. In 1979, afte promoted to the position of manager of insurance, safety and security, Ron immediately changed the department’s name to “Corporate Risk Management” and was subsequently promoted to the position of director, a responsibility that included overseeing insurance, safety and security for over 45,000 employees and 100 affiliated companies around the world.

In 1988, Ron was appointed by then Secretary of State George Shultz to the newly created Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC) where he was the only risk manager among the council of senior security directors. After earning his CPCU designation in 1970, Ron began a 25-year relationship with The Insurance Institute of America (now The Institutes) as a grader for CPCU and IIA examinations. He also taught RM 54 for many years at the University of Connecticut and later developed the University of Hartford Graduate School curriculum for their course in risk management. He retired in 2005, having served 44 years in the industry.

RIMS 2012 Opening Reception Recap

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If you were lucky enough to be at the opening reception for the RIMS 2012 Conference & Exhibition in Philadelphia, then you probably channeled your inner child for a good portion of the night.

The reception, held at the Please Touch Museum, offered guests access to not only delicious food, drink and networking opportunities, but also to the entire museum, which features nostalgic play spaces that brought back countless childhood memories. The 2012 conference is officially underway — let the fun begin!

Check back for daily updates from the RIMS 2012 Conference & Exhibition in Philadelphia, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.

Digital Book Wars

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A piece I wrote for the upcoming May issue of Risk Management:

In 1999, the Department of Justice found that Microsoft had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. It had essentially created a monopoly in the market for operating systems designed to run on Intel-compatible PCs, claimed the government. In a settlement, Microsoft was ordered to share its programming interfaces with third-party companies, a punishment that only recently expired. United States vs. Microsoft was arguably the most closely watched corporate legal case in recent history. Now, one may eclipse it.

On April 11, the DOJ filed suit against Apple and five large, traditional publishing houses, alleging that they committed antitrust and price-fixing violations in the e-book market. According to the allegations, Apple, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, Penguin Group Inc. and Simon & Schuster Inc. conspired to increase digital book prices and force Amazon to abandon its discount sales strategy.

As the first real player on the e-book scene, Amazon was able to dictate pricing to publishers, and it frequently sold digital books below cost to boost sales of its Kindle reader. Though book publishers largely opposed the practice, they didn’t have much choice since there were few other viable options for publishing and selling e-books at the time.

But when Apple came along with its iPad and got wind of publishers’ unhappiness with Amazon, the tech company decided to make a move. Apple introduced an agency pricing model under which the publishers set digitial book prices and Apple received 30% of the sale. For publishers, this was obviously a more attractive option than Amazon’s pricing strategy. And eventually, as more publishers threatened to withhold their titles from Amazon, the retailer adopted the agency pricing model as well.

The new model allowed Apple to gain a toehold in the potentially lucrative e-book market. And just as when it debuted the iPod and iTunes in the same year, the company was now positioned to profit from sales of both iPad hardware and content, rather than just from the hardware alone. “This would be sound commercial logic,” said Frances McLeod, managing partner at Forensic Risk Alliance, “but all commercial
activities must take place within the bounds of the law.”

The DOJ is not the first to question Apple’s influence on e-book pricing. The alleged conspiracy to raise e-book prices was the subject of a class action lawsuit filed against the same parties in a California district court last year. And in December 2011, the European Commission opened a formal antitrust probe for similar reasons.

So what does all of this mean to the parties involved? While publishers are likely pleased with the move away from Amazon’s discount pricing, it is their investors who will be keeping a close eye on the legal proceedings. “The actions of the DOJ will also have been observed by shareholders and by those who feel they have been wronged, raising the possibility that owners and litigants may also act to investigate alleged bad behavior,” said McLeod.

As for the retailers, Amazon has already made a few other enemies in the book publishing industry. Scott Turow, best-selling author and president of the Author’s Guild, has called the retail giant “the Darth Vader of the literary world,” suggesting that the company’s tactics will unfairly undermine brick-and-mortar booksellers and, ultimately, the publishing industry itself.

Apple is not faring much better. For a company that prides itself on its reputation and ability to understand consumers, its customers could turn on the tech giant if they believe that it is Apple’s fault that they are now paying more for digital books. In fact, after the price war began, Amazon was forced in some cases to raise e-book prices as much as 50% from its initial consumer-friendly $9.99 price point.

The DOJ lawsuit has already led to other changes. HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette settled with the government, agreeing to grant retailers the ability to reduce prices. Under the agreement, the three publishers will also be forced to create new contracts with Apple and other e-book sellers.

But this story is far from over. The DOJ is vigorously pursuing claims against Apple, Macmillan and Pearson, all of which opted not to settle. States including Texas and Connecticut—and let’s not forget Europe—are also seeking separate litigation against the involved companies.

Ultimately, many players in the market still have unfinished business. It seems one thing is finished for good, however: the agency pricing model.

Crisis Management in the Age of Cybercrime

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[The following is a guest post by Richard S. Levick, Esq, president and chief executive officer of Levick Strategic Communications. You can Follow Richard on Twitter @RichardLevick where he comments daily on risk management and crisis management.] 

Immense as it may be, the March 30 Global Payments data breach that dominated headlines is only the latest in a series of events that made this current crisis eminently predictable. If there are any illusions that this breach was anomalous, consider the extent to which high-profile data breaches similarly dominated headlines in 2011.

Sony suffered over a dozen data breaches stemming from attacks that compromised its PlayStation Network, losing millions and facing customer class action lawsuits as a result. Cloud-based email service provider Epsilon suffered a spear-phishing attack, reportedly affecting 60 million customer emails. RSA, whose very business related to on-line security, experienced an embarrassing and damaging theft of information related to its SecureID system, necessitating an expenditure of more than $60 million on remediation, including rebuilding its tattered reputation.

And the list goes on.

Right now, just about all businesses face cyber risks. The worst include intellectual property losses due to economic espionage — by far the greatest risk to companies — as well as data breaches and ideological “hacktivists.” And the growth rate of those risks often exceeds a company’s ability to fight them.

Over the last decade, companies have experienced exponential increases in the volume and type of their digital assets along with an explosion in the types of storage devices that house them. With enterprise resource planning software, email, cloud computing, laptops, iPads, smart phones, and other portable devises, companies may have data storage systems that number in the hundreds. Managing and securing critical information has become a commensurately more daunting task.

As the situation grows worse, many boards and senior management now take a head-in-the-sand approach to cyber-threat management. A recent survey from Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab analyzed the cyber governance policies of the Forbes Global 2000. Its findings are troubling. “Boards and senior management are still not exercising appropriate governance over the privacy and security of their digital assets,” states the report. Less than one-third undertake even the most basic cyber-governance responsibilities.

These findings are supported by an in-depth look at cyber-crime published by PricewaterhouseCoopers late last year. According to the survey, which polled nearly 4000 executives from 78 countries, while cybercrime ranks as one of the top four economic crimes (falling just after asset misappropriation, accounting fraud, and bribery/corruption), 40% of respondents reported that they had not received any cyber-security training. A quarter said that their CEOs and boards do not conduct regular, formal reviews of cyber-crime threats, and a majority reported either that their company does not have – or they do not know whether their company has – a cyber crisis-response plan.

Welcome to the risk management officer’s worst nightmare.

According to the Ponemon Institute’s most recent statistics, the average cost of a data breach is $7.2 million with the average cost per compromised record coming in at $214. But the damage done by a cyber-breach goes well beyond the initial information loss. Real costs from business interruption, intellectual property theft, lost customers and diminished shareholder value due to reputation damage all can — and do — inflate those figures. In fact, for 40% of respondents in the PwC study, it is the reputational damage from cybercrime that is their biggest fear.

As cyber-risks continue to grow, companies must therefore focus on reputation as well as strengthening the mechanisms with which data is secured. A few things are imperative.

Boards and senior management must take responsibility for crisis response. Their objective must be to crystalize the company’s crisis instincts – to make crisis response part of the institutional DNA.

Crisis plans are actually counter-productive if they are created simply to be put on a shelf and read only when they are needed. Particularly in the context of cyber-crime, a realm in which new risks seem to emerge almost daily, the need to revisit and revise the plans is exigent. Regular rehearsals, refinements, discussions and additions transform the culture into one rooted in not the possibility but, rather, the expectation of crisis.

Education of employees is imperative. Employees often assume that securing company information is solely the responsibility of company IT specialists – an assumption fraught with risk. Every employee in an organization has the responsibility and the means to protect company data.

In addition to education, the key for companies is to keep less information in the first place, according to Paul Rosenzweig, Esq., founder of Red Branch Law & Consulting, PLLC. Backing up data on the other end is also vital. And while there are attendant costs involved, they are well worth it, he says. “In a world in which the bottom line is everything and the benefit of your expenditure may be recaptured only over years, if ever, this is hard,” said Rosenzweig. “It may well seem like all cost and no benefit in the beginning – that is, until the day it is all benefit and no cost.”

Companies must also designate a response team and ensure that all participants understand their roles. During a crisis, the response team must make critical decisions with too little notice and too little information. Regular meetings ensure that team members understand their individual responsibilities and develop trust in one another. Periodic crisis team exercises allow companies to capture what goes right and what goes wrong in each simulation. The lessons learned are critical when a real crisis is at hand.

When a data breach does occur, companies must make full disclosure as quickly as possible and let stakeholders know how they plan to remediate the situation so that it will not recur. Focusing on corrective future initiatives can restore trust.

With the advent of new technologies, the risks for companies are now greater than ever. Companies’ ability to recognize this moment and transform the way they think about their information is key to long-term sustainability and brand value.