For Corporate Decision Makers:

You will learn how a risk assessment is put together, what options of management are available to you, what crises can mean to your company, how to define acceptable and tolerable risks, how to make better, sustainable and well documented decisions, and how other players have behaved in the past.

The stance adopted in this book is not a dark one. Risks do exist, and for some aspects they may be extremely high and catastrophic, but for a large part they can be dealt with, understood and managed in a sustainable way. Also, focusing on the “new risks”, i.e. the technological, food related, disease-related modern hazards certainly brings a skewed angle of observation of the world. Natural hazards still exist, are extremely significant, and in many cases do not fit the model described above.

As a matter of fact, the last decades have seen Risk Assessments being voluntarily used by a wide array of industries, or being enforced by national authorities, in environments where perceived hazards or visible-predictable consequences were such to possibly stir public outcry and indignation, i.e. decisive moments, particularly in times of danger or difficulty, generally named crises.

These environments have included, for example, heavy industries and energy production as well as chemical, petrol-chemical, natural resources, mining and transportation sectors, but any human activity can turn into a crisis due to media reactions, voluntary misinformation (Information Warfare), involuntary misinformation with consequences that can encompass image damages as well as significant monetary damages (loss of share capitalization).

Risk and Crisis Assessments have taken multiple forms, depending on their general scope and aim, the requested level of analysis, legal implications and requested or imposed level of detail.

The reality is that QRA & RBDM should be used in daily business decisions, where every penny counts and where high level concepts developed in the boardroom may be far less significant than immediate profitability decisions made at the mid-management level. At operational level, although avoiding complex mathematics is a general requirement, hard numbers are crucial in differentiating risks incurred by sometimes hundreds of components of a similar system (for example, a component can be a valve, a tank, an office, the CEO, a dam, a transformer station, etc).

Sample Chapter

Case Studies

Selected Articles

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