Description: The latest installment in a series that applies Buddhist principles to actuarial practice. This particular installment focuses on the author's recent experience in recovering from serious injury, the lessons from Buddhism learned during that process, and the parallels of healing to the challenges actuaries face when businesses or processes are "broken".

Description: Increasing uncertainties and volatility in financial as well as real goods markets increasingly reveal that controlling systems based on deterministic and pseudo-exact values are insufficiently eligible to manage the business activities. This raises the question how management systems can be modified to generate the adequate management impulses in volatile periods. Risk management deals from identifying, evaluating and aggregating chances and risks, which again determine the potential fluctuation range of relevant performance indicators. Everyday corporate life shows that risk management is considered important; but the corresponding processes to identify, evaluate and report chances and risks are seldom part of established decision criteria. This “paradox” lets assume that risks are managed in various differing and unsystematic ways. The combination of traditional controlling methods and risk management is not primarily a methodological challenge. The behavior of the whole organization, practiced over a long-year period, has to be transferred into a new corporate culture of transparent dealing with chances and risks. This paper describes the necessary change management process, which has to come along with necessary methodological modifications.

Description: This article is about how entrepreneur independent business owners can solve their day-to-day frustrations and problems with a simple and useful process for setting goals and building a plan to meet those goals.