(So many) bad things
can happen to
good companies

A butterfly can flap its wings in Beijing, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine. That’s a popular way of describing the butterfly effect, which suggests that complex systems are so interconnected that little events in one place can cause much bigger events to happen someplace else.

Little events. Like…tweets. Or bits of malicious code. Interdependent, multidimensional little events with the potential for global impact. Events that must be managed at the speed of social media.

This is the key insight that Marianne Nichols and her global strategic intelligence colleagues at Invesco have operationalized. The Atlanta-based investment management company no longer addresses threats like brand risk, cybercrime, terrorism, or natural disasters with discrete, siloed functions; the networked scale of the threats has made that approach obsolete.

And it doesn’t matter that risk—as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown—is generally impossible to predict. Customers and investors still hold management accountable for performance and results, even when a risk event is unprecedented. That’s why Deloitte has paired with Invesco to promote a reboot for corporate risk management overall—one that recognizes the change in the risk landscape and more closely aligns risk management with a company’s overall strategy.