Cuba has recently endured the impact of hurricanes Lili (1996), George (1998), Irene (1999), Michelle (2001), Isidore (2002), Lili (2002), Charlie and Ivan (2004). The provinces of Villa Clara, Matanzas and Pinar del Río have suffered the major damage, basically in coastal towns where thousands...

Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) recently completed the systematisation of their reconstruction projects which were implemented between the early 1990s and the year 2003 in the poor areas of Peru affected by disasters or internal war. Within these projects, technological housing...

Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC) was established in 1986. It was restructured in July 2003 to focus on specific technical areas: climate variability and change management, urban disaster risk management, public health in emergencies, building national and provincial disaster management...

Some classes of scenario planning tools and techniques are designed to inform near‐term strategic decisions. In addition, some of these are more appropriate for lower levels of uncertainty, while others are best suited for highly uncertain, truly ambiguous business environments. This paper...

Making an M&A deal “work” is one of the hardest tasks in business. A handful of best practices can reduce the risk and give the deal a fighting chance. The inherent danger in due diligence is not that companies fail to do it, but that they fail to do it well. The deals that are being struck...

This article urges executives to expand their view of risk. Instead of just defending against bad risk events, leading companies define and anticipate the upside risks that, when well managed, can deliver the maximum rewards. The discipline of strategic risk management allows firms to raise...

Managers in developed countries are increasingly interested in outsourcing as a potential source of competitiveness and value creation. There has been a growing awareness of the potential of outsourcing to support a range of strategies beyond that of lower cost. This article makes corporate...

Purpose – How des Xilinx Corporation, with worldwide headquarters in San Jose and European headquarters in Dublin, stay on Fortune magazine's top‐ten‐best‐companies‐to‐work‐for list and remain the market leader in the programmable logic segment of the semiconductor industry?...

Purpose – A risk to reputation is a threat to the survival of the business, but senior executives seldom focus on it. Design/methodology/approach – The reputational collapses in four cases (Merck, Marsh, Anderson and Monsanto) share a single striking feature: they were not limited to a small...

Purpose – The author points out that the same strategic behaviors that are associated with great success are also associated with failure. That is, the greatest rewards pose the greatest risks. He explains how corporations should manage risk differently at different levels of responsibility...