ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book outlines what we think we know about so-called “modern” risk management (primarily ERM but including other current forms), and then describes what the evidence reveals about risk management in action—that is, its performance and actual value contribution. It provides a short history of risk management—as we understand it today—and looks at the evidence of its effectiveness. The story of risk management starts with a collection of specific ideas and practices that all were responses to particular issues, problems, and challenges arising in organizational management over the course of the past 60 years. Risk management as it is seen and practiced today is not wrong in its particulars. Things that risk managers do, by and large, need doing (buying insurance, hedging financial risks, preventing accidents), but here we simply think that risk management has not been properly scoped.
