The Enterprise Risk Pendulum

I have been giving quite a bit of thought lately to the topic of enterprise risk management. In large part, this stems from the fact that I have worked on more than a few projects in which my client's risk tolerance was off the charts. I mean cray cray. In this post, I discuss three types of organizations with respect to risk tolerance:

• The Oblivious Enterprise
• The Zero-Risk Enterprise
• The Acceptable Risk Enterprise

The Oblivious Enterprise

This type of organization is perhaps best epitomized by a client of mine (call it ABC here). The company's mind-set could be epitomized as follows: There was no such thing as risk. Period.