Fundamentals of Risk Management: Understanding, Evaluating and Implementing Effective Risk Management

by Paul Hopkin

Fundamentals of Risk Management , now in its fourth edition, is a comprehensive introduction to commercial and business risk for students and a broad range of risk professionals. Providing extensive coverage of the core frameworks of business continuity planning, enterprise risk management and project risk management, this is the definitive guide to dealing with the different types of risk an organization faces. With relevant international case examples from both the private and public sectors, this revised edition of Fundamentals of Risk Management is completely aligned to ISO 31000 and provides a full analysis of changes in contemporary risk areas including supply chain, cyber risk, risk culture and improvements in risk management documentation and statutory risk reporting. This new edition of Fundamentals of Risk Management has been fully updated to reflect the development of risk management standards and practice, in particular business continuity standards, regulatory developments, risks to reputation and the business model, changes in enterprise risk management (ERM), loss control and the value of insurance as a risk management method. Also including a thorough overview of the international risk management standards and frameworks, strategy and policy, this book is the definitive professional text for risk managers.

489 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 3, 2017

Reviews

[Paul W. B. Marsden · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good risk management book but it is skewered towards the US despite using UK examples. The compliance risk section talks about SOX from the US but doesn’t seem to cover UK equivalents. The book barely mentions ISO 31000 other than a cursory overview which doesn’t do justice to the importance of the international standard and how it is commonly used in the UK.
Nevertheless I gleaned a lot of useful ideas and information.
I liked the approach of four risk categories; compliance, hazard, control and opportunity to give a quick grasp of both the negative and positive risks.
Hopkin’s analogy to explain the four types was to take the use of computers:
• Compliance risk is to meet data protection regulations
• Hazard risk could be a virus infection of computers
• Control risks (unknown and unexpected risks) could be project managing the upgrade of new software
• Opportunity risk could include the potential added benefits from new software such as increased productivity
I would place this book alongside other Risk Management (RM) books to get a more rounded and strategic understanding of the topics:
- James Lam’s two books - ‘ERM-Incentives to controls‘ and ‘Implementing ERM’
- Duffey & Saull’s - ‘Managing Risk-The Human Element’
- David Hillson’s ‘The Risk Management Handbook’
- Boothroyd & Thompson’s ‘Fundamentals of Risk Management’ 7th Ed
- Richard Steinberg’s ‘Governance, Risk Management and Compliance’
These are just a handful of other good RM books out there.