Managing Risk in Higher Education

The need to manage risk is widely acknowledged throughout the corporate world, and a well-developed body of knowledge is available to guide efforts to do so. Implementation of principles into practice, however, is mixed, often due not just to a lack of the right skills, but also because of a lack of commitment from senior management. Peter Tufano, Peter Moores Dean and Professor of Finance at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and formerly a professor at Harvard Business School, emphasizes that risk management should be considered an essential C-suite—that is, CEO and board level—activity, and be practiced by nonprofits as well as corporations. Tufano reviews an HBS case study of the World Food Programme (WFP), a division of the UN that feeds about 100 million people at risk of starvation that undertook an Enterprise Risk Management exercise beginning in 2003. He draws lessons from the WFP’s experience for colleges and universities to consider as they work to strategically manage their own risks.