Managing Risk and Reputation in a Complex World

Overview:

Introduction

Your company’s reputation takes years to build; yet it can be destroyed in a matter of minutes. Thinking ahead can make all the difference. Managing Risk and Reputation in a Complex World combines thinking with doing, providing a comprehensive set of strategic and practical skills to help you both assess your firm’s potential risks and seize new opportunities. You’ll learn invaluable tools and tactics that you can implement the moment you return to work — whether dealing with internal stakeholders, the government, media, or the public.

This program is timely, topical, and essential for anyone developing business strategy. You will learn to elevate the importance of beyond-market forces and make them more integral to a company’s core strategy.

Course Objectives

At the end of this course the participants will be able to:

• Evaluate and manage risk generated by policymakers and interest groups, stakeholders, and the media.
• Analyze, integrate, and take ownership of your company’s beyond-market strategy.
• Formulate and implement strategies to sustain your company’s interests and turn potential threats into competitive opportunities.
• Dissect real-world cases and learn from their examples.
• Build a strong network of peers with whom you can share ideas and experiences.

Targeted Audience

• Senior-level executives with at least 10 years of experience — from any size company, any industry, and any country
• Executives from large global companies that face challenges in a variety of different institutional arenas
• Leaders of startups or smaller organizations seeking creative ways to build competitive advantage
• Examples of appropriate roles: senior functional leaders transitioning into general management, division-level leaders who will soon assume corporate-level positions, and leaders driving strategy in the C-suite

Course Outline

Unit 1: Innovation and Regulation

• Understanding the regulatory rules that are in place and designing a business plan
• How startup and established companies alike can build strategies to account for regulatory constraints
• Formulate new business strategies that leverage regulation for competitive advantage.

Unit 2: Crisis Management

• What should management do when a crisis focuses the harsh spotlight of public opinion on their organization?
• The nature of crises
• Develop a deeper understanding of where they come from, how they evolve, and what you can do about them
• The skills and organizational structures required to prepare for, and productively manage, a crisis to avoid bringing lasting damage to a firm’s reputation

Unit 3: Self-Regulation

• Analyze how self-regulation can be used as a tool to deal with threats
• Abstacles that arise as companies and industries try to engage in self-regulation
• Recent successes and failures in self-regulation
• Privacy, consumer credit, movie ratings, and conflict minerals

Unit 4: Strategic Corporate Responsibility

• How should a company strike a balance among competing interests?
• Is trying to strike a balance even a smart strategy?
• What about the business’s responsibility to its shareholders?
• How should a company assess the effectiveness of its corporate social-responsibility initiatives

Unit 5:

• Revision
• Workshop