The corporate paperwork that created my firm was filed in May of 2009. We spent a few months designing the ASA website as a vehicle visitors could use to understand our services and serve as a research library for publications we would create. Though our primary focus would be on operational risks to the nation’s critical infrastructure sectors, our mandate included ethics reviews, policy recommendations, and improvement of existing laws – with a special focus on six key sectors: banking and finance, IT, energy, communications, public health, and emergency services.
In creating the website (www.anniesearle.com), we refined our mission and tested our premise. We knew that risk is not a comfortable topic for most executives, whether you’re a risk department of a large corporation or a small advisory firm. We set up a question-and-answer section on the website. We also designed risk workshops to offer companies and organizations, as well as customized risk roadmaps to solve clients’ regulatory challenges. We tested and completed the website that year in July.
We hired our first university intern in the fall, and one of their first jobs was to design and publish our first monthly newsletter in November. The newsletter had information on upcoming risk conferences as well as one “research note” published each month on a current topic analyzed against a risk framework – “examinations of a single topic with commentary in a short, digestible format, designed to be read by executives or experts.” (Reflections on Risk I) Initially, the ASA interns wrote the research note each month until I began university teaching in 2012 when we stopped hiring research interns to avoid conflicts of interest. At that point, I began selecting research notes from exceptional papers written for one or more of my classes that offered fresh perspectives on a current event or policy issue. Each research note was published first in the newsletter and then housed in the website's research section. When we had collected 25 or so new research notes, we began to publish them in softcover book format, at which point the copyright reverts to the author. Here we are fifteen years later, having published 180 research notes—most of them written by students as papers in classes I taught at the University of Washington—in a series titled Reflections on Risk. We have published six volumes, which are still available on Amazon.
Late this summer, we will publish the seventh and final volume of the series. Each volume has a short biographical sketch of the authors. Over the years, we’ve found that a side benefit of being published by ASA is where future employment is concerned. Many former students list the publication on their resumes, and some have reported this has helped open discussions with hiring managers.
The regularity of publishing a newsletter issue each month was also a personal pleasure for me. Whether teaching a risk course, talking about policy, or writing my columns, the world offered more than enough glaring examples of areas for improvement. In the first issue of the newsletter, I wrote two research notes to get the project off the ground, one on simpler internal controls and the other on pandemics as predictable surprises with a checklist I’d developed earlier. Both were built upon longer white papers written for the banking sector during my time at Washington Mutual.
Here I’d like to thank Emily (Oxenford) Hayes, editor of the newsletter, research notes, and five of the six published volumes. Her work has been impeccable for ASA, and she’s responsible for its ongoing successes.
I’m postponing consideration of the ASA What’s At Stake podcast series until later this summer. Retirement offers me time to work on a new edition of Advice From A Risk Detective, and the world has changed just enough to cause me to reconsider some of the recommendations I’d made in earlier editions. I’ll keep you posted.