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 CEO

The CEO is ultimately responsible for the performance and actions of the organization, capital efficiency is paramount. In recent years, Company Law and regulatory mandates have solidified the obligations of the CEO to both the business and shareholders. Risk management plays an integral part. "I want to be able to make decisions today that won’t cost me tomorrow"

A CEO must now take more care than ever to ensure that the organization is performing ethically, legally, and to the expectations set with stakeholders.

Here are some of the concerns and questions a CEO has in today’s marketplace:

• I could lose my trading licence, be imprisoned or risk a large reputational and financial penalty if I fail to be compliant with government, legal and industry regulations. Therefore, what compliance requirements do we need to monitor, what is the penalty if we are not compliant, where am I non-compliant and what am I doing about this?
• How can I see this across the whole group, with areas of weakness and their magnitude emphasized so that we can corrective action?  I want to see an aggregated view so that we can optimize capital efficiency.
• Show me that we are doing this in a manner that is prioritized so we hit the most significant threats and opportunities first (i.e we have an optimized model in terms of prioritization of resources).
• How much are we planning on spending on fixing the compliance gaps and how does this relate back to the exposure levels we have assessed (i.e. are we getting good ROI?)
• What is my total cost of insurance and what percentage of my exposure is this mitigating? Are we over-insured, are we insuring the right parts of our business and what can we do ourselves to self-insure?
• Do I have a loss history? Could risk assessments going forward be mitigated by a single global mitigation strategy rather than country or subsidiary based solutions that are “double counting”?
• What were my losses last year? What were the insurance claims costs as a result of these losses and is our capital being used efficiently?
• What business opportunities have we identified and what plans do we have for securing these, and do we know the risks that our decisions may trigger?
• Is there anything that a supplier does or an associated set of suppliers do to negatively impact my objectives and do we have mitigation strategies for the consequences?
• From our KPI’s I can see that we are on track to meet our objectives with regard to market share, brand reputation, share value and cash? But what is our view today of meeting the targets in 12 months time?
• Do my divisional directors assess their risk levels so we can compare their performance to the level of risk they create for the overall business? I need to assess whether this risk/return ratio is acceptable versus any other form of investment of capital.
• How many of our projects delivered against their objectives last year and how did any failures impact us? What are we doing to improve that situation this year? As a CEO I am focused on capital efficiency to deliver the results to the stakeholders.
• How do we win more competitive tenders for business? I want to increase the amount of business we win from existing and new customers. How do I stay ahead of my competitors, or at least better compete with them in winning large contracts?
• We need to be able to limit the amount of margin erosion we incur on our initiatives.