Tradeshow Floor: Onward and upward, risk managers

Risk managers, from the sounds of it, you'll need sunglasses for your future. The insurance market is as soft as the bed in my hotel room that I haven't slept in for a week. It's a "responsible" softness, said James Swanke Jr., a managing principal with Towers Perrin, whom I spoke with a couple days ago in the narrow meeting room in the bowels of their showroom booth.

Whether you buy into the insurers saying that they're not cutting prices willy-nilly (like they've done every soft market before), the opportunities are such that risk managers are coming to Swanke asking how they should take advantage of them while they are here.

But possibly the most important point from Swanke: risk managers need to know how to take advantage of these opportunities. How? By being able to communicate their advantages to their bosses. Speak, in other words, in the language of finance instead of insurance.

Part of the reason that Swanke brought up the topic was to promote a new tool from his firm that will help risk managers crunch numbers on cost of capital and produce figures that CFOs can really chew on.

Whether or not you need a mathematical tool to do this is up to you. Whether not Towers Perrin folks now read our blog because I mentioned their new tool is up to them. But what caught me about what Swanke was saying was that I was hearing the same thing everywhere in San Diego. Over a cold beer and an NBA playoff game, the leaders of the Towers Perrin insurance group told me much of the same.

Risk managers need to think, talk and act like business people.

Richard Meyers, in the RIMS special session on the job market on Wednesday afternoon, made the point of saying that 68 percent of risk managers report to finance, whether they work at private, public or nonprofit organizations.

To get the credit you think you deserve for this reporting -- and not just be considered a highly paid clerk or purchaser -- risk managers need to pick up business skills, especially the "soft" ones -- the ability to communicate, persuade, negotiate, collaborate, listen, act important, etc.

Throughout the week, I've heard people complain about the quality and depth of sessions at RIMS. About the traffic on the showroom floor. About their feet throbbing. I've heard people gush about San Diego and the restaurants, parties, weather and people. (The natives, by the way, seem a bit jerky to me. But I'm from the City of Brotherly Love.)

But what really caught my ear here, what really made me appreciate the value of an event like RIMS, was the message that seemed to be mixing with the oxygen in the air, risk managers breathing it in whether they knew it or not -- you are important. Act like it.