I’m honored to take the reins from Gloria Brosius to serve as your RIMS President for 2020. As we enter a new decade, we find ourselves on the precipice of massive global transformation.
The coming decade will demand more of us than ever before. Excellence in our profession will increasingly be measured by our ability to anticipate and meet rapid-fire strategic challenges with critical and fluid skills like resilience, creativity, and boots-on-the-ground tactical thinking. More and more, we will be called upon to balance propositions of long-term growth with the need to recalibrate to the wild pendulum swings of a volatile and often unpredictable marketplace and world.
In the face of all this, the risk management role continues to mature. We are relevant to the highest level of corporate critical thinking like quantifying and mapping initiatives to business critical mega-trends and designing creative, opportunity-oriented solutions too difficult to anticipate market changing events. Given the demands of a world in transition with massive disruptions on a previously unimagined scale, clearly risk management has become change management.
It’s time for risk management professionals to become the architects and senior editors of their companies’ long-term value creation stories. Keeping pace will require continually honing skills and embracing the new tools of a transforming business landscape.
Our past presidents have left a well-defined and auspicious legacy which I intend to honor and uphold. But together we must dare to move into this new decade armed with bold visions and big intentions. And we must ensure that we have the capacities this changing world is demanding of us now.
In this process, let’s keep at the forefront how valuable we are to one another. For years, I’ve turned to my RIMS peers to sharpen skills, explore strategies, and advance professionally. RIMS has built a longstanding tradition of superlative professional development offerings and opportunities for the risk management community.
Thanks to RIMS and our collective willingness to connect and collaborate for the good of our community, we stand on well-defined, solid ground as risk management professionals. But as the world around us shifts, we can’t stand still. In today’s climate, risk management is about creating and optimizing a whole spectrum of business value. Elevating risk as a strategic value-creating function elevates all of us and puts risk management in the c-suite where it belongs.
We must have the confidence and courage to step forward into this decade willing to do what it takes to embrace and grow into our evolving potential. During my tenure, I’ll be challenging corporate leaders everywhere to reimagine and re-value the role of risk management to increase our stature and strategic leadership. As the c-suite and boardroom doors begin to open, our thinking, approaches, and skills will need to evolve. RIMS will continue to support you by exploring and delivering innovative business ideas and training designed to launch a new business era for our profession.
I’m tremendously proud to join you on this journey as we set out together to make an indelible impact on the businesses we work for, the world we live in, and the people we serve.
Sincerely,
Laura Langone
RIMS 2020 President