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Mastering Catastrophic Risk: How Companies Are Coping with Disruption
A profound and insightful look at how company leaders prepare for and respond to shocks and crises that threaten their business.
Successful firms strategically manage and are more accurate in their assessment of large-scale risks. Doing so is increasingly challenging given the pace of change, whether financial, technological, regulatory, or environmental. Mastering Catastrophic Risk provides real-world practical insights into how large companies are responding to this new reality and develops a framework for smarter thinking about events that can damage a business.
As leading authorities on risk management, strategy, and company leadership, Howard Kunreuther and Michael Useem take us on a groundbreaking tour of firms' decision making process. They demonstrate how improving readiness for and resilience against future shocks is now an integral part of company strategy. Using the "DISRUPT" model they have developed, they highlight the seven primary D rivers of I nterdependencies increase exposure; S hort-term focus results in limited vision; R egulations require change and constrain opportunities; U rbanization increases the costs of disasters; P robabilities of disasters have increased; and T ransparency has enhanced public awareness of problems and impacts on firms' reputations. This updated paperback edition includes a new preface to address threats to business that have emerged or intensified in the past two years including existential threats like the coronavirus, self-inflicted calamities like the Wells Fargo customer account scandal, and
natural disasters like the West Coast wildfires and hurricanes on the Atlantic.
Some disruptions can be anticipated, while others arrive without warning. Their onset stresses decision makers, impairs company operations, and may even put the enterprise at risk. The business leaders and their governing boards face ever more challenging disruptions and must be ever more on guard. If your company is hit tomorrow, will it bounce back, or drown?
Successful firms strategically manage and are more accurate in their assessment of large-scale risks. Doing so is increasingly challenging given the pace of change, whether financial, technological, regulatory, or environmental. Mastering Catastrophic Risk provides real-world practical insights into how large companies are responding to this new reality and develops a framework for smarter thinking about events that can damage a business.
As leading authorities on risk management, strategy, and company leadership, Howard Kunreuther and Michael Useem take us on a groundbreaking tour of firms' decision making process. They demonstrate how improving readiness for and resilience against future shocks is now an integral part of company strategy. Using the "DISRUPT" model they have developed, they highlight the seven primary D rivers of I nterdependencies increase exposure; S hort-term focus results in limited vision; R egulations require change and constrain opportunities; U rbanization increases the costs of disasters; P robabilities of disasters have increased; and T ransparency has enhanced public awareness of problems and impacts on firms' reputations. This updated paperback edition includes a new preface to address threats to business that have emerged or intensified in the past two years including existential threats like the coronavirus, self-inflicted calamities like the Wells Fargo customer account scandal, and
natural disasters like the West Coast wildfires and hurricanes on the Atlantic.
Some disruptions can be anticipated, while others arrive without warning. Their onset stresses decision makers, impairs company operations, and may even put the enterprise at risk. The business leaders and their governing boards face ever more challenging disruptions and must be ever more on guard. If your company is hit tomorrow, will it bounce back, or drown?
250 pages, Hardcover
Published June 1, 2018
About the author
Howard C. Kunreuther
35 books4 followersHoward C. Kunreuther (November 14, 1938 – August 1, 2023) was an American economist.
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
March 28, 2020
This is merely a collection of anecdotes and survey responses dealing with post-crises actions taken to de-risk and improve corporate risk management. Only one brief chapter on the quantitative value of risk management, and this, like the rest of the book, features no analysis whatsoever, only a bland restatement of headlines and a few figures.
GE’s post-crisis fire sale of their finance division is heralded as sound strategy, despite the fact that this effectively killed the company.
Certainly the last Kunreuther book for me.
GE’s post-crisis fire sale of their finance division is heralded as sound strategy, despite the fact that this effectively killed the company.
Certainly the last Kunreuther book for me.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review