Description: This article covers the importance of letting teams lead you as a leader, that it's okay to admit you're not okay even at work, and that it's important to find informal ways for virtual teams to connect.

Description: Investing in and taking care of employees can result in many-faceted positive results, for your team and for your firm. We first state the case for "taking care of employees," then exhibit several practical methods for showing you care for your employees.

Description: The article presents specific operational guidelines when managers and staff are having difficult conversations. The article reviews half a dozen "popular" guidelines but shows that they are not specific. The article then in two layers presents specific operational guidelines. First the article based on a commonality of principles of email etiquette and Jewish Speech Laws reviews five guidelines for ordinary conversations: focus on events vs. people, focus on fixes vs. blames, being holistic (acknowledge any good done), be operational (indicate outcome and how to accomplish it), and use of tentative tone. The article concludes by adding three specific guidelines for difficult conversations: shared-self-evaluation, skillful use of breaks when emotions flair, and use of open-ended lead-on questions coupled with continuous empathy and offers of collaborative support.

Description: As technology changes the insurance landscape, it is essential that companies adapt quickly while staying focused on customer needs. This presentation will show how Agile and Design Thinking methodologies can help business and technology teams quickly test new ideas and optimize value delivery.

Description: In the insurance industry, machine learning models are increasingly used to make decisions that affect people's lives. In order to ensure that models are fair, they should be audited for bias. There are no hard and fast rules for bias audit; metrics that can be used to evaluate fairness vary depending on the context in which the model is deployed. In this session, we present a flexible framework that highlights key considerations in bias evaluation that can be adjusted to suit your process. In this session, we will learn about different metrics to assess fairness, discuss open source tools that can be used for bias audit, and walk through a case study.

Description: Discussion of recent Society of Actuaries sponsored research.

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 e-book contains topical essays that express the opinions and thoughts of a number of authors on the subject. It should be understood that the thoughts and insights shared herein are the opinion of the authors and not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the Casualty Actuarial Society, the Canadian Institute of Actuaries, or corresponding employers of the essayists.

Description: In this essay, we focus on the “Prospective Solvency Assessment” aspect of the NAIC’s ORSA. This places a spotlight on an insurer’s strategic decision making from a risk and capital management perspective. It requires those in senior management to describe actions they would take to address possible adverse changes in their risk and solvency position, i.e., what they would do to reduce risk, increase capital, and/or adjust the business strategy. We contend that by applying a slightly broader scope than the specific requirements of the NAIC’s ORSA, insurers can develop this into a valuable process to support risk-based decision making. In this essay, we initially consider how to determine which metrics to include in such a process and then discuss some important business requirements and practical challenges for implementing a calculation approach to support it. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: Preview of the LTC section's sessions at the SOA Annual Meeting in October 2008, including claims management, litigation and public relations, preparing for PBA and stochastic modeling, pricing, research studies, and securitizations and reinsurance.