Can We Handle the Truth? Barriers to Benchmarking Risk Management

by Scott Stribrny

"For any business function, one key sign of having 'arrived' is the pressure to 'benchmark,'" according to Michael Mainelli, the Mercers' School Memorial Professor of Commerce at Gresham College [5]. Why then does Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes, claim that "a flaw common to business and rampant in government is the failure to benchmark" [4]. This Executive Update aims to answer two questions surrounding this issue: Why should we be benchmarking risk management? And why don't more companies do this?