【正文】 . Iridium, a pany backed by Motorola, experienced an infamous failure related to operational risk. The highprofile satellite phone venture was launched in late 1998 with widespread media coverage, yet it failed within a year. The pany was not able to get enough satellites in orbit quickly enough, causing customer demand to fall far below expectations. These stories illustrate some key points about risk from a manager39。s perspective. The first is that traders, economists and academics think about risk very differently than do most business managers. For the former, the key issue in risk is variance the expected spread of possible outes. But that is not how managers think about it. For them, the biggest issue in risk is the potential for loss. As a result, they ask, What39。s the downside? If the risk is too high or even unknown panies typically pull back. The second point is that risk management has no silver bullet. As a result, many panies need to develop a more integrated view of risk. We have seen a tendency to separate risks into rigid silos operational risk, market risk, credit risk and so on, says Wharton39。s Herring. But what we have found is that major shocks and problems do not e that way. For instance, in the financial world, you would see trading desks staffed with people who were experts in market risk, but they were trading instruments that were laden with credit risk. The skills you need to think about each of those kinds of risk are very distinctive, and unless you have an integrated view of risk, you could encounter major problems. Nevertheless, risk taking remains what managing is all about, and not just in financial services but in every industry. Indeed, from an economic perspective, all firms fundamentally are in the business of taking risks based on their core capabilities. For the manager, then, the basic objective is simple: As one executive noted in Zur Shapira39。s 1995 book, Risk Taking: A Managerial Perspective: You have to be a risk taker. But you have to win more than you lose. The catch is that managers are always attempting to win more than they lose in the face of uncertainty about which are the good risks and which are the bad. Constructing a New 39。Risk Architecture39。 Given recent events, What I see now is a new risk architecture emerging for organizations, says Erwann MichelKerjan, managing director of Wharton39。s Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. Whatever industry you consider, it is always the same pattern. Things are getting faster, and therefore we need to make decisions faster, but based on information that we often don39。t have. Of course, we would like to have time to get all the information, but the reality is that managers have to make decisions under uncertainty, if not outright ignorance. To overe the problem, MichelKerjan sees some panies moving beyond traditional risk management practices, which have largely been internally focused. Call it Risk Management essentially, looking at a pany39。s existing position or investments and analyzing what could go wrong. However, organizations need to look beyond the boundaries of the firm and consider what is happening elsewhere. In recent years, businesses around the globe have bee increasingly interdependent, which brings great benefits in both efficiency and innovation but also increases panies39。 exposure to risks in many cases, risks that they don39。t even know about. Indeed, it is the systemic nature of the current crisis and how widespread the impact has been that caught most people by surprise. We were trained to solve problems with clear questions and clear scientific knowledge, says MichelKerjan. Knowing the historic risk profile, we made investment decisions. But historic data does not shape the future anymore, given how rapidly the world is changing. We usually look at the known issues and make a nice diagram with probability on one axis and impact on the other. That39。s Risk Management . Risk Management is [going] beyond the known issues to look at the links and interdependencies. You can no longer look at the risks independently of each other. The key, MichelKerjan adds, is to have knowledgeable people in the organization who are looking broadly and challenging assumptions about the future. Form a team of people and mandate that they e back with two or three major links that the pany has not yet thought about, he suggests. Not 25 links three links that they believe are important but not fully visible. And then bring some data about that to prove to you that it is something the pany has to think about. In addition, new techniques and technologies are now ing into the picture. For instance, so called trackandtrace technologies, integrating software and advanced scanning and identification technologies, are improving visibility across panies39。 supply chains, so they can precisely identify which ponents are ing from whom and where. Similarly, MichelKerjan is working on a project to identify the DNA of financial products, in an effort to provide more visibility into the ponents that go into a product and offer more effective tools for auditing. Consulting firms also are stepping up efforts to provide panies with a more holistic, multidimensional view of their risks. Even the definition of business intelligence is expanding from a focus on operat