Description: This article summarizes the issue of good control over internal meetings, identifies some symptoms to watch for and identifies tangible actions that can be taken to bring control over financial resources being invested in meetings.

Description: Provides a summary of key points from the ERISA Advisory Council Report on Outsourcing (2014). The report provides interesting and important perspectives and the article encourages the reader to look at the report and consider the issues raised.

Description: Many top-performing businesses aren’t just risk aware, but rather risk intelligent. Such a posture helps prepare companies for a major event and can demonstrate to a regulator or auditor that an appropriately strong control framework is in place. Better still, companies gain real strategic value from a “risk adjusted” understanding not only of their threats and vulnerabilities, but also the upside opportunities associated with various risks. It starts with having both qualitative and quantitative information to identify, assess and manage risks. Strategic risk management, at its core, is about creating value by increasing transparency and accountability, and quality of information. More than a mere compliance exercise, effective risk management enables more informed strategic decision making, increased accountability and transparency, a greater likelihood of organizational success, and – ultimately – competitive advantage, as borne out by many studies that correlate risk management and financial results.

Description: This article discusses challenges that short-term predictions have on actuaries' reputations, both as individuals and as a profession, and discusses strategies to improve our professionalism and better manage this risk.

Description: Discusses the insurance and actuarial profession in India.

Description: Actionable tips to improve the readability of business e-mails.

Description: Attempting to define what actuaries do from a student's perspective

Description: This article is a review of the book by Joshua Foer. It covers the history of memory techniques, the way a human brain organizes memory, and various problems and successes in memory recall. The author starts by interviewing memory savants, and learns from them that the ability to perform seemingly impossible memory tricks is simply a matter of studying and practicing proven techniques used for millennia. This review suggests that actuaries can benefit greatly from some of these techniques despite the availability of electronic hand-held devices to recall facts because the person who does not need to rely upon such devices can have a huge perceptual advantage in executive presentations.

Description: A personal account of an international assignment opportunity in Switzerland.

Description: The column summarizes tax and retirement matters that ACLI and its member companies have been actively addressing. These include IRS 2015-2016 priority guidance items, the Department of Labor proposed fiduciary rule, proposed IRS hedge fund reinsurance rules, and new IRS notional principal contract rules.