The big challenge for risk managers

Airmic News launches a debate that goes to the heart of what it means to be a risk manager. Board member John Ludlow sees a very limited future unless practitioners expand beyond their technical skills and become business people. If you wish to contribute your views, please contact the editor Mark Baylis, mark.baylis@airmic.co.uk.

Airmic members have a choice: “As a profession, either we come together and develop business leadership skills, become a mainstream business discipline and add significant value, or we stay as fragmented technical people, called upon only when needed, contributing little and failing to be valued,”according to board member John Ludlow.

John Ludlow’s route to the top of risk management sets him apart from most Airmic members. He has never worked in insurance nor does he claim to be professionally qualified in the technical disciplines that underpin risk management. Instead he has a business background in the hospitality industry. As he puts it, “I am a businessman first, risk manager second”.

By the age of 24, he was an area manager for Boddington’s brewery in the North West (now sadly no longer in existence, but the brand name survives). He has since held a number of senior management positions at high-profile companies in the UK leisure sector including Whitbread, Allied and Bass. As Bass demerged into separate businesses, he joined the hotel business, which subsequently became InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG). He has global responsibility for IHG’s risk management function, with a team of 60 people.

Ludlow is fiercely proud of his highly specialist and technical team, considering it his job to relate and integrate their message within the business agenda.  He helps them learn from each other and learn about other soft leadership skills, particularly change management and communication, enabling them to develop their careers and become more influential. He sees his department as a “team of teams” (a term he often uses), bringing them together under one umbrella with a common purpose. The aim is to create a more effective and joined-up presence, thereby overcoming the problems of misalignment and fragmentation of related but different disciplines which he sees as the blight of the risk management world. To use another of his favourite phrases, “together we are stronger”.

He believes that business experience is a big advantage for a senior risk manager: “It allows me to be a better business partner to senior executives. I understand their role, I understand their perspective and this enables me to set my message into a context that they recognise, understand and value.  This opens the door to what we need to get done.”

He says this ability to understand and communicate with executives at the highest level is something all risk managers should learn if they want to be effective at the top of their profession. Ludlow recognises that Airmic is doing much to help its members. He is a member of the working party overseeing Roads to Resilience, the research conducted by Cranfield Business School research on behalf of the association to highlight successful risk management.

“The report will show people what good looks like. The challenge will be taking the more technical members on the journey,” he says. In other words, there is a clear message here for ambitious practitioners to see what they need to do to run their functions – or else accept that their careers will be limited to the ‘bubbles’ around their own specialist areas.

It is all part of the education process that he sees as vital, helping to bring all the risk management disciplines together in a cohesive way. As he would say, ‘together we are stronger’.

John Ludlow