Pooja Prabhakhar

The simplicity in managing risk

In my role as Managing Director of BCP Associates, a legal auditing company, I think it’s incumbent on me to keep my finger on the pulse of what is going on globally in risk management. Having a sense of the best practices in this space across the world and across different industries means I am in a better position to advise my clients, and create value within my own organisation.

I was looking for a programme that would give me an authoritative understanding of the latest developments, as well as the sharpened skillset to achieve this, when I enrolled on the Leading Risk in Organisations programme at LSE.

LSE has an international reputation for delivering thought leadership in risk management, and I was honestly blown away by the quality of the programme. I particularly appreciated the expertise with which faculty combined complex analysis of risk with a very hands-on approach – setting out concepts and ideas and then bringing them to life and sharply into focus through the use of real-world industry cases and examples.

Something I have come away with is the understanding that the key determinant in risk taking and risk management is the underlying culture and the behaviours modelled by companies and their leaders. There is an almost staggering simplicity to this, and it’s totally sector and people-agnostic. The kinds of risks that companies take and the way those risks are managed is directly tied to the values that the organisation embodies and that are actively communicated to their employees. This is why innovative methods like culture on-boarding for CXOs and Senior Management are critical.

A few months on from the programme, I hosted a seminar with colleagues from a number of large global financial services companies, and this is something that we explored and debated in great depth.

The programme also gave me plenty of opportunity for interaction with LSE faculty who bring academic and industry insights, and with my fellow participants. While the professors were simply brilliant, there was also a real richness in the exchange of perspectives with my classmates who were very diverse both in background and culture.

Leading Risk in Organisations genuinely gives you conceptual and practical insights, as well as a depth of knowledge, that you can bring back to your clients and to your own organisation. It’s a learning experience that I would recommend to anyone – whether you work in the industry or whether you simply need to broaden your understanding of the dynamics at play in global risk management.