Since the active use of the term risk management, perhaps sometime in the 1980s, I have thought of the confluence of risk and management as an oxymoron. Management is the art of getting control of things and making them orderly and easier to understand; risk defines the flowing river of uncertainty. One may be able to foresee or anticipate risk, if enough pieces of information are available, but risk management can only occur when the risk is known and takes on visible properties. This is a technicality, perhaps, but since most applied risk management falls to the technical staff of law firms, the IT department, it is worth looking at an area of risk that contains some attainable management opportunities by reducing its unknown quantities.
Common to all risk is the failure to foresee. Projecting and predicting are possible, but only if risk is anticipated and the specific cells in the mental spreadsheet, so to speak, are not yet real numbers. Based on what we know from the past and the proper identification of variables, risk can be anticipated and the effects of anticipated risk can then be quantified as well.
Personnel Cuts?
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