Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Analogy

By Rick Nason, PhD, CFA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.

Steve Lindo, who is a risk expert with extensive experience in risk management, recently wrote a very interesting paper in the Journal of Risk Management in Financial Institutions. The title of the paper is “Risk Management Infrastructure as a Living Organism”[1]

In his paper, Steve creates the analogy that risk management in a financial institution is like one of the body’s critical systems. To quote the abstract, “This paper examines the essential elements of risk management infrastructure in a financial institution using another complex, intelligent, adaptive organism as an analogy – the human anatomy.”

There are many things to like about this paper, and in particular the fact that it points out that risk management and the management of financial institutions is a complex task (as opposed to a complicated task). This implies that you need to treat risk management and strategy in a holistic manner. You cannot fix solely the heart if it causes the nervous system to malfunction.

However the main thing I like about this paper is that it uses an analogy from another field – namely anatomy. As risk managers we have a lot that we can learn and use from examining how other fields of practice handle similar issues. Using analogies helps one to see things in a slightly different way, and that in turn leads to breakthroughs. The types of problems in risk management also exist in other fields. The use of more analogies like Steve Lindo uses will help us in risk management to learn better, faster and more efficiently.

[1] S. Lindo, 2013, “Risk Management Infrastructure as a Living Organism”, Journal of Risk Management in Financial Institutions, Vol 6, 1, 67-74

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Technical Presentations

By Rick Nason, PhD, CFA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.

Non-technical people do not like technical presentations. In my experience this tends to be particularly true for executives (but not all executives). Technical people also tend to squirm through non-technical presentations, and also tend to take them less seriously than they should. Two facts that are often not appropriately appreciated in risk management.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Carlin CRO

By Rick Nason, PhD, CFA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.

Waiting for my wife to get ready to go out this past weekend, I watched an old tape of the late comedian George Carlin. I have been a big fan of George Carlin since I was in high school. I really liked the way that he took our collective arrogance and brought it down to size. George Carlin made a career out of taking people’s opinions and actions about issues and events, and taking them one step further than most to show how illogical some of our most rational seeming ideas can be. In essence he showed the absurdity of conventional wisdom.

After watching the tape, I asked myself howe as a finance professor.ame="L鄰甯翿