The BP oil spill disaster exposed serious shortcomings in both technology and regulation, but the biggest culprit is a catastrophic failure of enterprise risk management.

The job of a risk manager is to hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst. That means putting emergency response systems in place to cope with a worst-case scenario.

It's hard to imagine a scenario any worse than this. An offshore oil rig explodes, killing 11 workers. The rig collapses. Oil keeps gushing from a deep-sea well, threatening the Gulf Coast, Florida Keys and perhaps even the Eastern Seaboard.

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