Current Secretary of Defense guidance to the armed services is to develop a strategically balanced Joint force capable of spanning the full spectrum of conflict. This concept is driven by acknowledgment that predicting every threat is unrealistic and promotes the idea that the best security approach is a flexible force capable of responding to a broad range of threats. The Army's Capstone Concept to support the Joint intent is development of a force that is not optimized towards specific threats but depends on rapid adaptability to threats as they are revealed. As envisioned, the Army's concept demands debate on the risk and affordability implications of this approach to strategic balance. This paper addresses a risk-based approach to balance the Army that assesses alternative postures and addresses the viability of balanced force concepts in mitigating national risk in a resource constrained environment. This assessment also examines alternate definitions and definitional implications of balance and the continued relevance of conventional capabilities and nuclear deterrence to a balanced force posture.

STRATEGIC RISK MANAGEMENT Having just experienced a global pandemic that sent equity markets into a tailspin in March 2020, risk management is a more relevant topic than ever. It remains, however, an often poorly understood afterthought. Many portfolios are designed without any thought given to risk management before they are handed off to a dedicated—but separate—risk management team. In Strategic Risk Management: Designing Portfolios and Managing Risk, Campbell R. Harvey, Sandy Rattray, and Otto Van Hemert deliver a reimagining of the risk management process. The book envisions a marriage between the investment and risk processes, an approach that has proven successful at the world’s largest publicly listed hedge fund, Man Group. The authors provide readers with a new framework for portfolio design that includes defensive strategies, drawdown risk controls, volatility targeting, and actively timing rebalancing trades. You will learn about how the book’s new approach to risk management fared during the recent market drawdown at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. You will also discover why the traditional risk weighting approach only works on certain classes of assets. The book shows you how to accurately evaluate the costs of defensive strategies and which ones offer the best and most cost-effective protection against market downturns. Finally, you will learn how to obtain a more balanced return stream by targeting volatility rather than a constant notional exposure and gain a deeper understanding of concepts like portfolio rebalancing. Perfect for people working in the asset management industry and financial policy makers, Strategic Risk Management: Designing Portfolios and Managing Risk will also earn a place in the libraries of economics and finance scholars, as well as casual readers who take an active approach to investing in their savings or pension assets. PRAISE FOR STRATEGIC RISK MANAGEMENT “Strategic Risk Management shows how to fully embed risk management into the portfolio management process as an equal partner to alpha. This should clearly be best practice for all asset managers.” —Jase Auby, Chief Investment Officer, the Teacher Retirement System of Texas “This book shows the power of integrating risk and investment management, rather than applying risk management as an afterthought to satisfy set limits. I was pleased to shepherd some of the key ideas in this book through the publication process at The Journal of Portfolio Management.” —Frank J. Fabozzi, Editor, The Journal of Portfolio Management “Financial markets today are quite different from those of the last century. Understanding leverage, correlations, tails, and other risk parameters of a portfolio is at least as important as work on signals and alpha. In that sense, bringing risk management from ‘control’ to ‘front office’ should be a priority for asset managers. This book explains how to do it.” —Marko Kolanovic, Chief Global Market Strategist, J.P. Morgan A powerful new approach to risk management in volatile and uncertain markets While the COVID-19 pandemic threw the importance of effective risk management into sharp relief, many investment firms hang on to a traditional and outdated model of risk management. Using siloed and independent portfolio management and risk monitoring teams, these firms miss out on the opportunities presented by integrated risk management. Strategic Risk Management: Designing Portfolios and Managing Risk delivers a fresh approach to risk management in difficult market conditions. The accomplished author team advocates for the amalgamation of portfolio design and risk monitoring teams, incorporating risk management into every aspect of portfolio design. The book provides a roadmap for the crucial aspects of portfolio design, including defensive strategies, drawdown risk controls, volatility targeting, and actively timing rebalancing trades. You will discover how these techniques helped the authors achieve remarkable results during the market drawdown in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and how they can help you protect your assets against unpredictable—but inevitable—future bear markets. Ideal for professionals in the asset management industry, Strategic Risk Management: Designing Portfolios and Managing Risk is a valuable resource for financial policy makers, economics and finance scholars, and anyone with even a passing interest in taking an active role in investing for their future.

Guidelines for Risk Based Process Safety provides guidelines for industries that manufacture, consume, or handle chemicals, by focusing on new ways to design, correct, or improve process safety management practices. This new framework for thinking about process safety builds upon the original process safety management ideas published in the early 1990s, integrates industry lessons learned over the intervening years, utilizes applicable "total quality" principles (i.e., plan, do, check, act), and organizes it in a way that will be useful to all organizations - even those with relatively lower hazard activities - throughout the life-cycle of a company.

The Balanced Scorecard translates a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The four perspectives of the scorecard--financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth--offer a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between outcomes desired and performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard objective measures and softer, more subjective measures. In the first part, Kaplan and Norton provide the theoretical foundations for the Balanced Scorecard; in the second part, they describe the steps organizations must take to build their own Scorecards; and, finally, they discuss how the Balanced Scorecard can be used as a driver of change.

A comprehensive guide to the key investment decisions all investors must make and how to manage the risk that entails Since all investors seek maximize returns balanced against acceptable risks, successful investment management is all about successful risk management. Strategic Risk Management uses that reality as a starting point, showing investors how to make risk management a process rather than just another tool in the investor's kit. The book highlights and explains primary investment risks and shows readers how to manage them across the key areas of any fund, including investment objectives, asset allocation, asset class strategy, and manager selection. With a strong focus on risk management at the time of asset allocation and at the time of implementation, the book offers important guidance for managers of benefit plans, endowments, defined contribution schemes, and family trusts. Offers a thorough examination of the role of risk management in the decision-making process for asset allocation, manager selection, and other duties of fund managers Written by the current head of portfolio design for the New Zealand Superannuation Fund Addresses the fundamental importance of risk management in today's post-crisis fund management landscape Strategic Risk Management is a comprehensive and easy-to-read guide that identifies the primary risks investors face and reveals how best to manage them.

Businesses often embark on initiatives that require huge investments and projects with prolonged time frames. If not closely grounded to reality and integrated with dynamic changes consistently shifting the marketplace, where customer and end consumer of the product or service is at the center stage of it all, unexpected surprises and disruptions can render those initiatives worthless or outdated. A perception-driven view to keep on increasing production in view of past forecasts may leave a photographic paper manufacturer stuck with tons of inventory with no demand, as the digital image innovation sneaks in as a disruptor. A taxicab fleet operator planning aggressive operations may face huge losses after investing in licenses, vehicles, and drivers, as Uber and Lyft capture the market. Concrete and mortar stores, grocery and retail outlets, banks, and restaurants can be upset by new players offering online services and delivery at lower costs as they operate with no overhead costs. An online-only bank can afford to offer higher interest rates. An AirBnB model capitalizes on available housing capacity surplus to offer affordable accommodations. Creativity in thought and implementation will keep rewriting business models to make everything better while eliminating redundancy. Though business leaders start off with a diligently worked-out and well-defined strategy, as disruptions hit or unexpected happens, they need to balance the current situation and keep on rebalancing throughout the course of execution. Detaching emotions to take a view of the practicality and changing customer preferences, the balancing act at every stage is the key to success and growth. This book lays down a practical, easy-to-follow framework to balance and rebalance the strategy, redefine actions to achieve positive results by leveraging factual data, enabling redesign for disruption, growth, and toward an emerging collaboration business model. Interactive workshops to engage in solving real business problems following the approach outlined in this book are available.