RIMS President Stresses Leadership, Integrity

So what does Mr. Ewing do to relax?

You might expect a risk manager to opt for something safe, like sipping pi?a coladas by a shady pool.

Instead, Mr. Ewing says, "For relaxation, I drive a motorcycle and I jump out of perfectly good airplanes."

"Skydiving is an infatuation I'm growing to like more and more,
the risk manager said.

Mr. Ewing will dive into a new role when he becomes president of the New York-based Risk and Insurance Management Society Inc. this week. While his duties with RIMS are time consuming, it is time is well spent, he said, noting that the organization plays an important role in the careers of risk managers.

During his tenure, he said, he will focus on "the two pillars–leadership and integrity–within the profession."

Chief financial officers of companies, as well as their general counsel heads, need to recognize risk managers as the leadership professionals for the risks of their organizations.

As for integrity, he said: "In watching CEOs and CFOs being led away in handcuffs, you don't see very many risk managers. And I think that is a huge credit to our profession, as well as to the RIMS organization, that we continue to take the high road. Whenever there is an opportunity that is a little gray, we always do the right thing, basically."

Mr. Ewing stressed several major areas he will focus on in the coming year.

Expanding conference participation.

"Our goal is to make it the premiere conference for risk managers and underwriters, and we're also going to look to broaden that to begin to invite human resource, legal and finance people," he said. Last year, "we were thrilled to have a number of attorneys attend." He said RIMS is also looking to build relationships with security and safety-loss prevention professionals "because risk management is a much broader scope and touches all these areas."

Retention and growth.

Associations have gone through some tough times, he said. "You've got to justify that and continue to put the value back into why it's important to be a RIMS member." He said RIMS will help risk managers indicate to upper management that RIMS is an important part of the answers they can provide to their corporations.

He also said RIMS is looking to grow internationally, as markets open up in China and areas like Croatia and Romania. "As those countries begin to privatize what had been government-run businesses, such as steel manufacturing and cars, insurance and risk management will become factors. Those potential members can utilize RIMS to get started."

Professional development and education.

RIMS plans to focus on marketing the RIMS fellow, "a premiere designation," he said. "We think we can draw a lot of professionalism [to the industry] through that designation."

RIMS also plans to market educational programs to corporations and other entities. "We're beginning to do that in partnership with brokers and the insurance community," he said.

Technology.

"No longer can a risk management professional simply feel that the thing on the desk is something to put plants on top of," said Mr. Ewing, referring to a desktop computer. Technology, he said, "continues to be what drives most of us."

"We're electronically wired as risk management professionals with cell phones and pagers and PDAs. We need to keep up with that technology," he said.

Mr. Ewing also noted that RIMS Web site is gets "extremely positive" reactions from risk managers. "We get a number of hits routinely from risk managers saying they didn't know we existed and we are the answer" to their problems.

While Mr. Ewing acknowledged that his list gives him "a lot to do in 12 months," he said "you've got to have lofty goals in order to reach for the stars."

Mr. Ewing has taken on an similarly substantial set of challenges since he joined Park Place Entertainment in November 2002.

The company, which employs 55,000 people, consists of 27 major resorts including 29,000 hotel rooms and 2 million square feet of gaming space, he said. Net revenue is more than $4.6 billion and recognized brands include Caesars, Grand Casino, Ballys, The Flamingo, the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas and Hilton gaming.

Among the biggest tasks Mr. Ewing faces at Park Place Entertainment is putting an enterprise risk management approach for the entire organization.

Giving an example of the work this entails, Mr. Ewing said that when he started at the company, some of the workers' compensation claims staff reported to human relations, others reported to security, and still others reported to risk management. "Each culture handled risk management in a different way. So [reorganization] will take some time," he said.

Park Place is a four-and-a-half-year-old company, he said, that merged with the Hilton, Grand Casinos in Mississippi, Ballys and the Caesars facilities.

Since it is still a young company, the previous approach to risk management was "putting out fires, which in any merger or acquisition is a lot of the portion of the heavy lifting that is done. And it was done admirably," he said.

Now, he added, "Were taking a strategic approach as opposed to a reactionary approach." The company is building a world-class organization in risk management by instituting an enterprise risk management approach, which means "getting involved with the advertising and exploring derivatives and hedging." He added that support "has been tremendous from the highest levels."

Company support is key for successful implementation of enterprise risk management, he said. "I know a lot of my colleagues are preaching the ERM approach and they say their corporations are giving it to them. Unfortunately what they are sometimes getting is "more lip service."

If support from upper management is lacking, he added, there are other ways of getting support, such as from other company locations, outside brokers or service providers.

Mr. Ewing said Park Place is currently considering forming a captive insurer. "What we put in the captive depends on the domicile," he said. "Possibly terrorism [insurance], but we would need to explore that. Also property and cyber risk. There are a lot of possibilities."

He added that a captive should not be viewed as a panacea because of the hard market. "I think it's a full commitment and that technically you're going to be running an insurance company," he said.

Beyond the question of terrorism coverage, Mr. Ewing said that the Sept. 11 attacks "also brought to the forefront contingency management, crisis management and crisis programs." For Park Place Entertainment, he said, security of properties is a much bigger issue now.

"We're looking at quicker reaction times to packages left unattended, stepped up surveillance and other things," he explained.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, April 7, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved. Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.