What a member of staff may say to outside third parties presents companies with quite difficult issues, the author observes. “In general, companies do not very actively encourage transparency in such cases. This may sometimes be justified on the grounds of commercial confidentiality, but this is usually a rather thin veil for fears over company reputation.”

There are, however, subtleties in this, elaborates Henriques. For instance, while it would seem entirely reasonable for staff members to be completely open about issues at work with their families, if they so wished, the same may not be right if the staff spoke to a reporter.

“Do reporters, and the wider public to whom they ‘report’, deserve an employee’s transparency? Is there a right to hear the whistle blown?” In answer to these questions, the author reminds readers that reporters are “more than sympathetic ears and can be rather treacherous friends. They are typically people acting for another company, and their job is to discover information that can be sold.” A fairly common maxim, therefore, is to advise staff to do nothing they would not like to see reported in the papers, adds Henriques. His concluding chapter, titled ‘a future for integrity,’ pleads for honesty together with a willingness to explore difficult issues, both on the part of companies and those who challenge companies. “Since we are all stakeholders of companies in one way or another, it is up to all of us to bring about change,” appeals Henriques. “In this, transparency can be our greatest ally.”

Bold discussion.

You know IQ as intelligence quotient and EQ as a similar measure for the emotional dimension. David Apgar introduces ‘risk IQ’ to help us manage what we don’t know. We need a test to measure our ability to assess learnable risks, he argues in Risk Intelligence ( www.landmarkonthenet.com ).

“More exactly, we need a way to score learning speed relative to others grappling with the same learnable risk. The simplest test equal to the challenge consists of five elements measuring the impact that your experiences in business, job, or outside life are likely to have on your ability to reach accurate judgments about a specific new risk.”

Apgar explains how this test can let you quickly assess your relative ability to assess a new risk in embryonic or old projects. The author cites as analogy the Apgar score, devised in 1952 by Dr Virginia Apgar, as a simple and repeatable method to quickly and summarily assess the health of newborn children immediately after childbirth.

“Virginia Apgar was a paediatrician and anaesthesiologist who developed the score to ascertain the effects of anaesthetic agents on neonates,” informs Wikipedia.

Of special interest to professionals should be the chapter on conducting risk strategy audit.

D. MURALI

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