Articles on PR for People

The Limits of Presidential Power

In my operational risk seminar this spring, students ranked and then restacked and ranked the top operational risks present in our world.  No one was especially pleased with the results, and the top three risks – cyber-threats, global uncertainty, and terrorism – seemed nearly interchangeable, depending upon the month. As we came to the end of the quarter – particularly with the terrorism acts in Manchester, London, and Tehran -- “global uncertainty” seemed to encapsulate the other two risks, particularly when the elections in France and Great Britain are taken into account along with the performance of the U.S. president on his first diplomatic trip abroad. 


Channeling Nelson Mandela

How far can our great institutions, whether courts of law, public libraries or even universities go to preserve the values and freedoms most of us have enjoyed? If the three branches of government were designed to provide a system of checks and balances on power, then where are we on the spectrum right now? How much worse will it get before course corrections begin? 


Yes, Virginia, We Still Have Three Branches of Government

The Government has taken the position that the President’s decisions about immigration policy, particularly when motivated by national security concerns, are unreviewable, even if those actions potentially contravene constitutional rights and protections. The Government indeed asserts that it violates separation of powers for the judiciary to entertain a constitutional challenge to executive actions such as this one.


Conduct Risk Presented Daily on the National Stage

In a new volume, Conduct Risk: A Practitioner’s Guide, published by Risk Books of London, I argue that there are three root causes of conduct risk: tone, culture and conflicts of interest.  In the rollup to the inauguration of a new president, all three types of risk are playing out daily. Our relationships with other countries as well as a kind of seige...


Can You Spell Kakistocracy?

The morning after national elections I received an email from my editor at The Risk Universe magazine, in which she asked if I would write a reflection on risks connected with the election results. I said yes because I thought that with a month’s passing I would have a better sense of where the president-elect would be taking us. After all, by then he would have made his cabinet appointments, which would tell us a great deal. I...


Understanding Crisis Management

As an operational risk consultant, I encounter clients who have no business continuity plans—“that takes too much time and money” and/or “we don’t have anyone on staff who knows how to do that kind of stuff”—and who have opted instead to create plans around disaster response and/or crisis management.  Sometimes such plans are emergency management oriented, with a fat binder full of procedures, and in such situations, what can be done to...


Managing Privacy Risks

 “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures…”

This language from the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution comes closest to protecting personal information and defining privacy as a right, even though the word “privacy” is never mentioned. The Constitution was written to limit the powers of government as much as  the...


Entrepreneurial Risk

If you’re an entrepreneur and focused on growing your company, one would presume that you’ve done an operational risk assessment.

     Such an assessment takes into account more than just expenses or revenue. It includes the set of business assumptions you have made, from your expected market placement among your competitors, to whether your expenses will exceed your revenue for some period of...