Description: This article defines "elevator pitch" and why one is needed. A great elevator pitch is an indispensable competitive advantage that will accelerate your career progress. A poor one can leave you toiling in anonymity.

Description: The author explores challenges that actuaries face at work, and the typical response continuum, which includes panic, inertia, striving, coping, and mastery.

Description: The author shared her personal experience in how to find a mentor and work with the mentor to improve her communication and managerial skills.

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: Stress tests and scenarios are often used as an informative tool to help stakeholders understand the risk profile of a firm. These analyses are often informational only and not directly linked to internal decision-making. This paper describes our approach to integrating stress tests into a regular decision-making process as part of our Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA). We have implemented a framework and analytical process that both enhances management’s understanding of our risk profile and links that to the development of our risk appetite. In this applied paper, we describe the framework and supporting analytics we established to achieve this goal and the practical implications for obtaining buy-in from senior management to establish this as an ongoing process.

Description: Accomplishments of the past year and a look at initiatives for the year ahead.

Description: The Society of Actuaries' health leadership met earlier this year for an all-day meeting in Chicago. A significant portion of that meeting was spent discussing current challenges facing the U.S. health care system and how the SOA can best serve its members by addressing top priority issues. The Actuary Magazine, April/May 2005

Description: A Tribute to Norman Hill

Description: Editor's Note for June 2012 International News

Description: Actuaries should understand the economic considerations involved in the formulary drug decision-making process, and the presence of actuarial input in the process could improve it, especially by tying it to overall decision making for the health plan. From Prescription Drugs Monograph, M-HB04-1.