Articles on PR for People

Conduct Risk Presented Daily on the National Stage

In a new volume, Conduct Risk: A Practitioner’s Guide, published by Risk Books of London, I argue that there are three root causes of conduct risk: tone, culture and conflicts of interest.  In the rollup to the inauguration of a new president, all three types of risk are playing out daily. Our relationships with other countries as well as a kind of seige...


Can You Spell Kakistocracy?

The morning after national elections I received an email from my editor at The Risk Universe magazine, in which she asked if I would write a reflection on risks connected with the election results. I said yes because I thought that with a month’s passing I would have a better sense of where the president-elect would be taking us. After all, by then he would have made his cabinet appointments, which would tell us a great deal. I...


Understanding Crisis Management

As an operational risk consultant, I encounter clients who have no business continuity plans—“that takes too much time and money” and/or “we don’t have anyone on staff who knows how to do that kind of stuff”—and who have opted instead to create plans around disaster response and/or crisis management.  Sometimes such plans are emergency management oriented, with a fat binder full of procedures, and in such situations, what can be done to...


Managing Privacy Risks

 “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures…”

This language from the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution comes closest to protecting personal information and defining privacy as a right, even though the word “privacy” is never mentioned. The Constitution was written to limit the powers of government as much as  the...


Entrepreneurial Risk

If you’re an entrepreneur and focused on growing your company, one would presume that you’ve done an operational risk assessment.

     Such an assessment takes into account more than just expenses or revenue. It includes the set of business assumptions you have made, from your expected market placement among your competitors, to whether your expenses will exceed your revenue for some period of...