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The purpose of this paper is to examine the management of strategic public sector risks in communities and municipalities.

This research collates information on public sector risk management through a series of key informant interviews and content analysis of municipal plans.

Financial, environmental, social and other strategic risks were found to be important by communities but not necessarily managed as part of the strategic planning process.

The paper explores the question: what are the strategic risks that communities report on and how they are managed? What risks are identified in communities and how they are managed, if they have significant practical and social implications.

It is an interesting time to study public sector risk management. From a regional policy development perspective, public sector organizations will be facing substantial strategic risks in the coming years due to demographic changes (implications of the graying population), urbanization, economic downturns (or booms in certain regions of North America), as well as changes from advances in technology and communication.

The world in which companies operate today is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, thus subjecting contemporary forms to an array of risks that challenge their viability in an increasingly competitive landscape. Organizations that cling to their traditional ways of operating impede their ability to survive while those able to embrace evolving changes and lever their strategic response capabilities (SRCs) will thrive against the odds. The possession of such capabilities has become a prominent explanation for effective adaptation to the impending changes but is rarely analyzed and tested empirically. Strategic adaptation typically assumes innovation as an important component, but we know little about how the innovative processes interact with the firm’s SRCs. Hence, this study investigates these implied relationships to discern their effects on organizational performance and risk outcomes. It explores the effects of SRCs and the role of innovation as intertwined adaptive mechanisms supporting strategic renewal that can attain superior performance and risk effects. The relationships are analyzed based on a large sample of US manufacturing firms over the decade 2010–2019. The study reveals that firms possessing effective SRCs have the ability to exploit opportunities and deflect risky situations to gain favorable performance and risk outcomes. While innovation indeed plays a role, the precise nature and dynamic effect thereof remain inconclusive.

Today, long-term success requires firms to sense changes in their environments early and react efficiently to them. Increasing middle managers’ participation in decision-making about market-related and product-related questions has been suggested as one way of enhancing this strategic responsiveness; abandoning formal planning, such as annual budgets, has been another. Yet, empirical evidence on the matter is scarce and conflicting. Drawing on data from Denmark’s 500 largest firms, we show that participation of middle managers in decision-making about new products and markets to serve, in-deed, increases firms’ strategic responsiveness as assessed by a reduction in firms’ downside risk. However, this effect is not a direct one. Nor does it interact positively or negatively with the emphasis put on formal planning as submitted in literature. Our evidence suggests that emphasis on planning mediates the relation between stronger participation of middle managers in decision-making and the increase in firms’ strategic responsiveness. This has implications for ongoing theory building and practice.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the links between a company’s position in a corporate network with its financial performance and strategic risk in the context of the largest Central European stock market.

This study integrates the theory of social network analysis (SNA) with corporate governance theory with a special focus on resource dependence theory. Using the framework of network social analysis, the authors use network measures of social capital and embeddedness.

The results of studying companies listed on the Polish stock exchange indicate that a company’s corporate network position has a significant negative impact on strategic risk while having no influence on its financial performance. The research also highlights the importance of a firm’s corporate governance model for both performance and strategic risk.

The data collected, and SNA measures used made it possible to conduct a cross-sectional study. Compared to longitudinal studies, this type of study has a couple of disadvantages addressed in the paper. In the future, the dependencies observed in this study should be tested using longer-term data.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper integrating the corporate personal and capital networks to test risk and performance dependencies in the context of Poland’s corporate governance model. The findings and conclusions can also be applied to analyzing Central and Eastern Europe stock markets.

There are several ways that risks and uncertainties might be discussed in the context of assessment and analysis – several of which could be inferred from previous chapters. Here, Chapters 6 and 7 are structured around what might be called strategic risks/uncertainties and operational risks/uncertainties.

This chapter presents the strategic risk/uncertainty assessment and analysis challenge. Most current thinking on risk management – enterprise risk management (ERM), but even including more traditional approaches – place expectations on leaders and top managers to provide guidance on risk policy, but also require those individuals to understand the challenges for which they are responsible. As implied previously, this domain mainly consists of uncertainties. Typically, top managers deal with aggregated operational data that – in itself – might be measurable but owing to the effects of consolidation tend to present leaders with a singular strategy/issue that is unique to the organisation and therefore not well-suited to statistical analysis. Furthermore, scanning for future threats and opportunities is decidedly a matter of considering the unknown, the emergent, and even the unimaginable. Within this assortment of challenges are the very large-scale features that – among many things – compel consideration of collaboration with other organisations. Here these special risks/uncertainties are labelled global risks.

The issue of complexity is here revisited, and this discussion serves two particular purposes. Complexity theory (and complex adaptive systems) offers some insights into methods of assessment and analysis, but they also provide some useful views on the nature of the uncertainty field in the context of complex environments. This discussion will offer some consideration of traditional, ERM, and alternative approaches and the appropriate ‘fit’ of assessment and analysis into these frameworks.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that strategic responsiveness is of paramount importance for effective risk management outcomes and to introduce an empirical study to demonstrate this.

Real options logic is adopted to explain how effective risk management capabilities improve performance and how innovation and financial slack enhance this effect. The propositions are examined across 896 companies using two‐stage least square regressions.

The study reveals that risk management effectiveness combines both the ability to exploit opportunities and avoid adverse economic impacts, and has a significant positive relationship to performance. This effect is moderated favorably by investment in innovation and lower financial leverage.

The analysis is based on a sample of large firms, which may affect the generalizability of results. Nonetheless, the study shows that effective risk management capabilities differentiate the firms and determine success and failure. It further underscores the importance of combined innovation policy and capital structure decisions as firms deal effectively with risk and uncertainty.

The findings indicate that corporate management must consider commitments for innovation and financial slack to enhance positive risk management effects. This result is in dire contrast to traditional beliefs that tighter resource management and higher financial leverage lead to better economies.

This is one of few studies to explicitly consider strategic responsiveness as instrumental for effective risk management outcomes while investigating the economic effects associated with the ability to combine generation of upside gains and downside loss avoidance.

This paper aims to discuss the emergence of corporate reputational risk in terms of social media, exploring its threats to and possibilities for organizations' strategic reputation management.

Reputation risk, the possibility of damaging one's reputation, presents a threat to organizations in many ways. Little is known, however, about the connections between reputation risk management and social media as a mediated business environment. Following the latest conceptualizations of strategic reputation management and social media, the paper identifies several challenges for organizations. To make sense of this issue, the paper proposes a novel context for strategic reputation management, founded on the metaphor of ambient publicity, which involves not only social media, but also organizations and their stakeholders.

The paper argues that social media expands the spectrum of reputation risks and boosts risk dynamics, and that social media can have notable effects on corporate‐level strategic endeavors, which must be considered in order to be successful in the modern business environment. Nine tenets for corporate leaders involved in strategic reputation management are presented.

The paper offers new insights on social media's relation to reputation risk and its management. The ambient publicity, for example, has value to leaders involved in strategic reputation management when trying to identify factors characterizing the changing business environment. Understanding ambient publicity as an environment of meaning indicates that organizations, their stakeholders, and the public create a “complex narrative web” surrounding reputation. The more unified this web is, the stronger the organization is in terms of reputation risk.

The purpose of this study is to explain the interrelationships between the elements of strategic thinking, technological change and strategic risks. The main objective of this research is to identify the hierarchy for the elements of thinking, technological change and strategic risk and also to identify the driving powers of these elements.

The methodology used in this study is modified total interpretive structural modelling and MICMAC analysis which gives the interrelationships and also the driving powers of the elements by analysing the relationships between the elements from the existing literature. This method helps us in answering/understanding the “what”, “how” and “why” of the research. Modified total Interpretive structural modeling is considered in this study, which helps in doing both the paired comparisons and transitivity checks simultaneously. A digraph is constructed at the end of the analysis, which shows the links between the elements, and a driver dependence matrix is constructed, which shows the driving powers.

This study gives an understanding of the role of the elements, the relationships between them and the hierarchy of addressing these elements, and also the driving and dependence power. Findings of this research give us an understanding of how strategic thinking/technological change/strategic drives the performance of the firm.

This study is conducted with the help of existing literature; this can be further extended by considering the expert opinion.

The model explains the direct and transitive links of the elements and the strength of the relation between them, which helps the researchers and the practitioners to understand the driving power and importance of these constructs. It also helps us to understand the role of these elements and, if implemented in an organisation, which elements need to be prioritised for enhancing the performance of the firm.

Research done in the past has individually analysed the elements effecting strategic thinking; this study identifies the relationships between the elements of all three constructs and helps in understanding the levels of hierarchy.

The purpose of this paper is exploratory. The author seeks to put forward propositions on how firms may best conceive business risks in an environment characterised by constant change and uncertainty. To construct such a reality, the author examines how the military manages its engagement with strategic risk and uncertainty.

The paper presents a summated examination of literature published over the last four decades covering three major areas of management literature; risk management, competitive strategy and military tactics are conducted.

The propositions which are put forward provide the foundation for the empirical development of an appropriate framework for strategic risk management.

The major contribution of the study is that it has focused readers on not only strategic risk and competition, but on how lessons can be drawn from the military's experience of dealing with irregular forms of competition.