IRM conference told profession must break free of finance function shadow

The theme for this year’s conference was ‘Practical strategies for risk at board level’. In his ‘How to speak truth unto power’ presentation Mr Hilton began to address this topic by pointing out that the governance and risk control business is alive and kicking but is perhaps not totally effective at board level. And much of the problem is that power is not speaking truth unto itself, let alone outsiders speaking truth unto power, he said. But the real problem, he argued, is that the finance function dominates business with an undue influence. “I formed the view many years ago, that you can chart economic decline with the increasing power of accountants—there is a direct correlation. The elevation of accountants was the elevation of the finance function in business, and the fact that you are putting a financial value on everything seems to neglect so many other things which actually determine the survival of the business—their customer service, the way they treat their employees, and so on,” he explained.hideAll of these have been subjugated over the past thirty years in the name of finance, said Mr Hilton. And now there is a backlash. “If you want to know why business is in trouble, it is because the values of the community are not matched by the values of business,” he pointed out. “The community cares about all these other things like service and whether the company is a good corporate citizen, whereas the company is entirely focused on finance and shareholder value.” He warned about the dangers of risk management going down the same route and drawing all its information from the finance function and not enough from wider aspects of corporate behaviour. This, he said, will become much more crucial than before because of the changing attitude of society to business. His message was simple: “You must stop thinking of business as being mechanical, and being a machine that behaves in a predictable way. Businesses are a collection of people, of human beings, and that makes them biological and they grow in bizarre ways, unpredictable ways.” He urged risk management as a profession to develop metrics to help business cope with people risk. “Because it is humans that blow up businesses not machines. It is humans that bully people. And it is humans that are scared about getting fired, not adding machines or desks. So the human dimension is what makes business tick, and if you want to be relevant to business, you have got to get your mind around these things and work out ways of assessing, controlling, managing and advising in that context. If you stick to finance, you create a very rigid structure. And the thing about business is that it is flexible and changes.” He continued: “I would urge you as risk professionals to make sure that you root what you do in the real world, and this is one of people and politics and ego and drive and ambition. You must tailor your skills and your product to that environment, as well as having it systematically perfect.” He finished by explaining that he didn’t really know how you speak truth unto power. But, he said, until risk professionals find a way to do so ‘you are not going to get the relevance that I think you deserve in the modern corporate world’. The guest speaker that followed Mr Hilton also gave a clear message to risk professionals. There is a new reality, driven by activism, protest, new technology, social networks and graduate disillusionment and those involved in risk management need to understand and adapt to this new reality. Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight’s economics editor, entitled his talk ‘Twenty reasons why it’s all kicking off everywhere’ and looked at reasons for the increased social unrest in 2011 and the deeper causes of the phenomenon. He cited the Arab Spring, the English Summer Riots, Occupy Wall Street and the European Fall as examples of recent unrest. “We are in the middle of a big wave of unrest. We are in a period of big change, once in every 50 year change,” he said. According to Mr Mason, the wave of protest is in part the delayed impact of the Lehman Brothers crisis, as well as the effect of technological change. The common factors in the protests were graduates with no future and the networked individual with a new way of thinking. He said that workers linked up to social media are like a ‘Jacobin with a laptop’. They have weak ties and loyalties to both the firm and the team. They have no fixed skills and are highly networked and part of the global city. Above all, with these graduates and workers feeling disillusioned and lacking hope about the future, they use networks to fight back, said the newsman. They are characterised by the rapid formation of alliances, are part of horizontal activist groups and adopt a very specific method of activism, which he described as ‘swarm, sting, dissipate’. He explained that many protestors adopt the concept of ‘consensus only’. “Unless a consensus is reached, no action is taken,” he said. “And they would argue that this does not slow them down, because the speed of technology makes up for it—technology speeds the action up, but the decision can be slow.” He discussed the parallels, often cited, with the wave of protest and revolution that spread across Europe in 1848 (though not in Britain). Within three years, those revolutions were over and, in most cases, resulted in more dictatorial regimes, such as in Germany and France. There was a strong worker element then but today it is being driven by a radicalised middle class—it is driven by the head not the stomach, he explained. He concluded by explaining that after 1848 the regimes that came to power delivered growth and, in general terms, things got better. The real issue today, he said, is whether or not things can get better fast enough. He concluded by telling the risk management audience: “Please don’t put this in that compartment that says, ‘we might have some risks in terms of corporate social responsibility’. The real relevance is much more core to the way business models are changing and the way that risk factors are emerging.”

IRM conference told profession must break free of finance function shadow

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