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.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Sessions: INS208: The dangers of the last session
Speaking in the last session on the last day of RIMS is not for the faint of heart, or the boring. At the start of INS208 (about the perils of online advertising), the RIMS rep who introduced the speakers stressed just how important, cutting edge and interesting the session would be. He cited how only one in 10 session ideas submitted to the RIMS conference organizers gets chosen to be developed into an actual session. Being one in 10, INS208 just had to be good, he was implying, so please stick around until 1 p.m. and the end of the session, he was pleading.
Then he left.
As can be expected, not all of the audience listened to him. Some of us fled. Those of us who stuck it out appeared to be listening all the way through. Maybe my fellow audience members have the unique talent of sleeping with their eyes open. I have tried to learn this skill, and have attended workshops in India with a yoga master who possesses complete control over all his bodily functions, but I am a failure at it.
The speakers, Martin Myers of HellerEhrman LLP and Chad Milton of Marsh, did their best to battle through the audience's unavoidable last-day malaise, and through an Internet connection that was so slow that it could have been dial-up. Maybe it was.
That was probably one of the biggest downfalls of the session. It was, after all, about online adverts, so Myers' efforts to show some examples of said online ads -- streaming video of user-generated Pepto commercials, for instance, or even just the homepage for American Apparel -- were frustrated by the crapitude of the convention center IT system.
It's a shame. The session focus was something I'd never really seen discussed before anywhere else -- how the legal and liability vagaries of the Web can and are affecting advertising in blogs, social networking sites, user-generated video and other content, and other video games. Cool stuff. (Too bad if you left the conference a day or two early.)
It turns out, though, advertisers have much of the same exposures and lack of protections that online content generators have. For instance, when a corporate Web site allows its employees or visitors to blog or post comments, they might be liable for those contents. The ISP might even be liable. Same holds true for companies that create ads from user-generated content.
And the insurance situation is similar too. CGL does not touch this stuff. But E&O underwriters are trying to.
Or as Milton put it, "The E&O underwriters are crawling all over themselves to show they understand this."
Now that I'm rehashing the PowerPoint details of the session, it does seem like some pretty heavy slogging for the last session on the last day of RIMS. To those of you in the audience with me until 1 p.m., and especially to Martin and Chad, I salute you.
Then he left.
As can be expected, not all of the audience listened to him. Some of us fled. Those of us who stuck it out appeared to be listening all the way through. Maybe my fellow audience members have the unique talent of sleeping with their eyes open. I have tried to learn this skill, and have attended workshops in India with a yoga master who possesses complete control over all his bodily functions, but I am a failure at it.
The speakers, Martin Myers of HellerEhrman LLP and Chad Milton of Marsh, did their best to battle through the audience's unavoidable last-day malaise, and through an Internet connection that was so slow that it could have been dial-up. Maybe it was.
That was probably one of the biggest downfalls of the session. It was, after all, about online adverts, so Myers' efforts to show some examples of said online ads -- streaming video of user-generated Pepto commercials, for instance, or even just the homepage for American Apparel -- were frustrated by the crapitude of the convention center IT system.
It's a shame. The session focus was something I'd never really seen discussed before anywhere else -- how the legal and liability vagaries of the Web can and are affecting advertising in blogs, social networking sites, user-generated video and other content, and other video games. Cool stuff. (Too bad if you left the conference a day or two early.)
It turns out, though, advertisers have much of the same exposures and lack of protections that online content generators have. For instance, when a corporate Web site allows its employees or visitors to blog or post comments, they might be liable for those contents. The ISP might even be liable. Same holds true for companies that create ads from user-generated content.
And the insurance situation is similar too. CGL does not touch this stuff. But E&O underwriters are trying to.
Or as Milton put it, "The E&O underwriters are crawling all over themselves to show they understand this."
Now that I'm rehashing the PowerPoint details of the session, it does seem like some pretty heavy slogging for the last session on the last day of RIMS. To those of you in the audience with me until 1 p.m., and especially to Martin and Chad, I salute you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
