Fundamentals of Enterprise Risk Management: How Top Companies Assess Risk, Manage Exposure, and Seize Opportunity Hardcover - 2014 - 2nd Edition

From the jacket flap

Back in the 1990s, two startup retailers launched their companies with a then avant-garde idea of selling products over the Internet. One was a bookseller named Amazon. The other, a now-almost-forgotten grocer called Webvan.

Why did Amazon become one of the formidable business successes of our time, while Webvan ended in bankruptcy? It turns out that Webvan overlooked three business risks that caused their launch to fizzle. Yet a savvy risk manager today might have readily foreseen all of them.

Risk blindness also accounts for how a fax machine in Taiwan all but sank the shoe manufacturing industry in the United States. It explains blunders that caused Daimler to buy the Chrysler company for $38 billion, and sell it ten years later for only $8 billion. And why once-dominant Sony was largely elbowed out of its U.S. market by Samsung. Risk blindness has even compromised national security.

The terrifying fact is, since this book's first edition, risk management failures have become far more spectacular, while taking sufficient precautions against them has grown increasingly complex. Whether you're a business owner or an executive, you must either get on top of the situation or get buried under the consequences.

Fundamentals of Enterprise Risk Management provides an expansive yet focused approach that will radically improve your ability to recognize risk and minimize loss, as well as understand how effective risk management helps you pursue opportunities. New to the second edition is:

* New material on heat mapping, collaborative "swarming," and other methods of detecting and addressing the risks to your business

* Information on "risk clustering" to help you clarify, account for, and document risks that your company must address

* A new section discussing how Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning were able to help themselves to reams of the U.S. Government's top secrets--and disseminate them around the world

* A focus on how to analyze your corporate culture to reveal the risks (as well as strengths) of your enterprise's management style

* A new chapter on surprising "Black Swan" events that endanger your business and your career

* You'll also learn about new ways of improving risk management communications...techniques for dealing with healthcare implementation...the latest information for identifying risks to capital, intellectual property, and your markets...and more.

As enterprise risks rapidly grow and evolve, you'll need to grow your knowledge with them. Otherwise, inadequately addressed perils could impact virtually every aspect of business operations and profitability -- among them cybersecurity, management structure, and employee benefits.

In this extensively updated edition of his original groundbreaking work, John J. Hampton will walk you through the critical and often new things you urgently need to know about and act on promptly.

John J. Hampton is a professor of business at St. Peter's University, and former executive director of the Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS).