Over a decade and a half into the 21st century and a growing number of stakeholder groups now share a reasonable expectation: that their organisations should be capable of delivering long-term stakeholder value. From a stakeholder perspective, the promise of sustainable value delivery should be expected to be an integral part on an organisation's corporate vision, mission statement and strategy. In business, the ability to deliver sustainable value to stakeholders requires a subtle blending of both value creation (offence) and value preservation (defence) efforts. The value preservation imperative represents an organisation's responsibility to its stakeholders to take adequate steps to help preserve value and help defend against value erosion, reduction, or destruction. Corporate defence is synonymous with value preservation and a corporate defence programme represents an organisation's collective programme for self-defence. An integrated corporate defence programme represents a comprehensive methodology which actually incorporates, integrates and aligns the organisation's critical corporate defence efforts at strategic, tactical, and operational levels. This includes individual programmes relating to the management of governance, risk, compliance, intelligence, security, resilience, controls, and assurance. A robust corporate defence programme must incorporate each of the eight critical components, as individually each has a unique and important role to play in addressing value preservation. Each of these components provides an organisation with their own unique perspective (governance-centric, risk-centric, compliance-centric, intelligence-centric, security-centric, resilience-centric, controls-centric, and assurance-centric) on any given issue. What is important is that an organisation scrutinises its activities through the lens of each of these critical corporate defence components. The presence of each of these component-centric perspectives within an organisation's defence programme helps to develop a more holistic view of value preservation, one which can help to fortify the organisation's corporate defence programme
