Need for Risk Scorecard

Earlier this year, Harvard professor Robert Kaplan (the originator of the Balanced Scorecard used by many companies in setting strategy and managing their businesses) sat down for an interview to discuss how companies can learn from the latest financial crisis. His answer to an inquiry into what has been lacking at companies is quite interesting and consistent with the thoughts of this blog. Here’s what he had to say.

If I had to say there was one thing missing that has been revealed in the last few years, it’s that there’s nothing about risk assessment and risk management. My current thinking on that is that I think companies need a parallel scorecard to their strategy scorecard – a risk scorecard. The risk scorecard is to think about what are the things that could go wrong? What are hurdles that could jump up, and how do we get early warning signals to suggest when some of these barriers have suddenly appeared so you can act quickly to mitigate that. [Risk management] turned out to be an extremely important function that was not done well by many of the [financial services] companies we talked about earlier. Risk management was siloed and considered more of a compliance issue and not a strategic function. Now we see that identification, mitigation and management of risk has to be on an equal level with the strategic process.

Professor Kaplan is right on point with what is needed today by companies in the complex, globally competitive world we live in.