A CEO once told me proudly, “We are focused on growth, not on doom and gloom.” That company collapsed 18 months later after a vendor fraud wiped out 40 percent of their working capital. He had confused optimism with strategy.
Risk does not wait for a board resolution. It compounds in silence. When I was called in to help a logistics firm bleeding cash, they kept blaming “market volatility.”
But the real cause was buried in a contract signed five years earlier with a vague clause on fuel price adjustment. One loophole. Hundreds of millions lost. Not theft. Not sabotage. Just risks they never saw coming.
I see this common in many ICT service level agreements for the provision of core banking applications and ERPs, where a hidden bad clause causes the company to bleed cash daily.
Here is the irony. Managing risk looks expensive. Systems. Reviews. Audits. Training.
But ignoring it? That is how you lose your license. That is how reputations die.
Risk is not a compliance burden. It is an investment in survival. When I work with boards, I start by mapping risk against their strategic plan.
You cannot talk of innovation while ignoring cybersecurity. You cannot expand to new markets while blind to regulatory changes.
If you are not discussing risk in every management meeting, then risk is discussing you in silence. Leadership takeaway:
I recommend my Risk Cost Calculator
- a) List your top three ignored risks.
- b) Estimate the cost if they explode tomorrow, financial, reputational, operational.
- c) Compare that to what it would cost to proactively manage them.
You will realise something: Risk management is cheaper than regret.
