Today’s Financial Times special report on risk management quotes Hans-Kristian Bryn, director of Mercer Oliver Wyman’s enterprise risk consulting practice as saying: “We are seeing a shift from executives being concerned with being able to comply with the governance process, to executives asking: ‘How do we get maximum value out of the effort we are deploying in risk management?”

The shift in approach bodes well for reducing unnecessary legal risk and building a corporate culture of compliance and legal literacy.  The more integrated risk management is into day-to-day decision making, the more companies will be able to minimize unwanted risk and maximize opportunity. 

The five most dangerous words in business may be ‘everybody else is doing it’.

Warren Buffett in Sept. 27 2006 memo to The All-Stars, an elite group of Berkshire Hathaway managers as reported by MSNBC.com

Long admired for his financial risk savvy, Warren Buffett is now showing off his legal risk savvy.

He warns that the phrase ‘everybody else is doing it’ should be a red flag and that more than one company has relied on that phrase to its detriment.  Look no further than the current options backdating scandal and engineered accounting practices of Enron and Worldcom.

“Start with what is legal, but always  go on to what we would feel comfortable about being printed on the front page of our local paper,” he cautions.

Warren, I couldn’t have said it better myself, even though it took me close to 300 pages to lay out my Legal Leverage® Process Portfolio and tee up the same leadership challenge in The Business Guide to Legal Literacy: What Every Manager Should Know About the Law (Jossey-Bass, 2006).

I think I love you.