Risk Analysis and Management


““If you take risks, you may still fail.  If you do not take risk, you will surely fail.  The greatest risk of all is to do nothing.”

                                                                                                                            - Roberto Goizueta, former CEO of Coca-Cola

We have many on-going examples of companies that don’t manage risk well and don’t understand the risks they are taking.  Examples include car recalls, bank failures, oil spills, mining disasters and other crises which could have been anticipated and avoided.  A McKinsey survey of Boards of Directors reported “36% of Directors did not fully understand the major risks facing their business; an additional 24% said their board processes for overseeing risk management were ineffective, and 19 % said their boards had no processes.”  Increasingly, risk management responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of financial managers.  This seminar provides insights about Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) and what our professional standards say every company must do to appropriately anticipate, manage and mitigate major risk.

Basic Course Information

Learning Objectives

*Understand risk terms, risk categories, and the Committee of Sponsoring *Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) model

*Understand relationship between COSO ERM and SOX

*Understand Financial Manager’s role in risk assessment and mitigation

*Learn six tools to anticipate, assess and mitigate risk


Major Subjects

*What is a good business definition for the term “risk”?

*What are the traditional and new categories of risk?

*What is the COSO Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) model?  Who owns the ERM process?

*What is the difference between a risk control process checklist approach (per SOX) versus a risk-based approach?

*How do risk assessment concepts and methods differ for small versus large companies?

*How can financial managers use the ERM process to help align their organization’s risk appetite with its strategy? 

*What is the financial manager’s role in risk assessment and risk management? 

*What are some common risk analysis and management tools?  How can the financial manager use them to facilitate a meeting with other senior managers to anticipate, manage and mitigate risk?