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Vulnerability and the Corporate Immune System: An Integrated and Systemic Approach to Risk Management Alessandro Capocchi full chapter instant download
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Alessandro Capocchi
Vulnerability and
the Corporate
Immune System
An Integrated and
Systemic Approach to
Risk Management
Vulnerability and the Corporate Immune System
Alessandro Capocchi
Vulnerability
and the Corporate
Immune System
An Integrated and Systemic Approach to Risk
Management
Alessandro Capocchi
University of Milano-Bicocca
Milan, Italy
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
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I wish to dedicate this book to all who have been a part of my education
and my teachers and mentors throughout my lifetime.
Teachers and mentors don’t always know the true extent of the impact they
can have, and they don’t often get to hear how much they are appreciated.
Often, we don’t immediately understand the enormous gift they have
bestowed upon us. Often it is only over time and with growing maturity
that we can comprehend and appreciate how important they have been in
guiding us along the way.
I was fortunate with the teachers and mentors I encountered, and I
remain deeply grateful to them.
A special dedication to my wife Sara and to my son Edoardo and Giorgio,
and to my daughter Vittoria Luisa.
Preface
vii
viii PREFACE
Prevention does not start with risk: risk is an external variable to the
company and the socioeconomic system. Risk is a dynamic variable, and
as the experience of COVID-19 teaches us, it is not always visible or
predictable.
Prevention originates from the company’s and the socioeconomic
system’s vulnerability level. The vulnerability pertains to the internal and
not the external dimension. The vulnerability of a company or a socioe-
conomic system relates to the health and well-being of which they are the
bearers.
Being an internal condition, vulnerability can be adequately managed
by those with roles of responsibility and decision-making tasks within the
company or the socioeconomic system. To be adequately managed, the
vulnerability requires a medium-long-term time perspective as it cannot
be limited to the short term. Taking up the dialogue reported in the
backstory, the diagnosis ends in the short term, in the exact instant it is
conducted. Vulnerability management requires foresight and the ability
to plan the company’s and socioeconomic system’s future.
Passing from an approach linked to risk to one linked to the dimension
of greater or lesser vulnerability means substantially changing manage-
ment models: management must increasingly be projected into the future
and adopt a temporal perspective in its decisions that cannot end in a
short period. Vulnerability management requires accurate planning skills
and, above all, requires constant knowledge, awareness, and education at
all levels of the complex organization.
A further difference between the risk and vulnerability approaches is
how risks are addressed. Almost all risk management manuals find a long
list of corporate risks. By nature, each risk corresponds to recipes and
tools to mitigate its probability and/or effects.
Vulnerability management attributes centrality to the company’s
“health conditions” and the company’s “immune system.” Vulnerability
management aims to strengthen the immune system regardless of the
specific nature of the risks to which the company is exposed.
Vulnerability management does not replace risk management. The
management of the vulnerability dimension integrates risk management
upstream by strengthening the necessary cohesion between the different
managerial systems within contemporary complex organizations. This is a
part of the COVID-19 lesson.
PREFACE ix
Before writing this book, I spent several years of work and relationships
with people, managers, and companies I was lucky enough to meet and
get to know and from whom I had the good fortune and the ability to
learn. In a word, experience.
I am trying to remember everyone by name, but I want to under-
line the many phases in my academic and professional life. Each phase
was accompanied by new experiences that left me with several teachings.
The experience gained over many years of work is the knowledge I have
acquired over time. I hope not to stop being curious and investigate the
phenomena surrounding me.
At the same time, I hope to pass on my curiosity and rigor with which
I conduct the analyzes to my students, collaborators, my son Edoardo
and Giorgio, and my daughter Vittoria Luisa.
Learning is a demanding activity, time-consuming at the base of which
there must be curiosity, listening, observation, and passion. We always
learn everywhere. I hope the new generations are more and more curious
and are not content to find the answers to their questions just within the
smartphone screen.
xi
The Backstory
To understand the path that led me to write this book, I want to recount
a dialogue I had a few weeks ago, in November 2022, with a very active
physician in the fight against smoking—Dr. Biagio Tinghino. The conver-
sation I will describe took place fortuitously at the end of the writing
of my book. However, it faithfully expresses the reasons that prompted
me to examine this still little-debated topic in Italian and international
literature.
For some years now, I have been directing at my university—Univer-
sity of Milano Bicocca—an advanced training course accredited by the
Lombardy Region through the Academy of PoliS Lombardia for the
physicians that conduct complex structures: i.e., for all the doctors who
become directors and as such acquire a managerial role within the struc-
tures in which they operate. These are excellent professionals with very
high technical skills who, however, do not always possess managerial
skills both from a subjective point of view—i.e., related to the aware-
ness of one’s role—and from an objective point of view—i.e., linked to
the knowledge and use of the managerial tools.
We discussed this doctor’s activity in the Italian anti-smoking associ-
ation at lunch. He offered this observation: technology has dramatically
improved diagnostic processes and pathways. Today, thanks to new tech-
nologies, we can diagnose lung cancer even at an embryonic stage,
as imaging diagnostics can identify infinitely small nodules. The Italian
xiii
xiv THE BACKSTORY
public system, like other European public systems, is moving in the direc-
tion of making mass screening increasingly accessible, investing enormous
financial resources both in the purchase of new technologies that are used
by public structures in which to carry out diagnoses and in the production
and provision of diagnostic services on the population at risk. Are we sure
that this type of investment should be considered prevention? Wouldn’t it
be preferable not to talk about prevention but simply the early diagnosis?
These are the two questions he asked me, which I have tried to address.
In managing a risk represented by lung cancer, for which many studies
identify smoking as one of the possible risk-increasing factors, population
screening activity cannot be considered prevention. This activity is instead
to be regarded as an early diagnosis.
For my doctor at lunch, prevention consists in tackling the causes and,
therefore, the factors of risk exposure: in this case, in his opinion, in
reducing smoking. For this doctor, prevention means changing the popu-
lation’s habits and not simply increasing the screening activity, which, in
any case, even in the face of a negative diagnosis, does not exclude the
possibility that the disease may appear later.
The content of this book seeks to analyze this aspect, i.e., the distinc-
tion between early diagnosis and prevention. Of course, we are not
dealing with human beings in the book, let alone reducing lung cancer.
However, there are numerous similarities between the approach that has
characterized risk management in recent decades and the approach that
we would like to implement in companies with this book: strengthening
the corporate immune system.
These similarities appeared evident when the COVID-19 pandemic
broke out in Italy, especially in Lombardy in February 2020, with the
well-known zero cases of Codogno in the Lodi area. COVID-19 has
not only affected human beings with often tragic consequences but
also affected our socioeconomic systems with just as many tragic conse-
quences. The consequences of COVID-19 on complex socioeconomic
systems are not exhausted today, and the pandemic seems to have loos-
ened its grip. These are consequences whose effects will last for many
years and perhaps decades. These effects have severely affected the
behavior of individuals and corporate organizations throughout the entire
economic system. These consequences cannot fail to raise questions about
the stability of our socioeconomic systems. As we have seen, the estate has
been tested for COVID-19.
THE BACKSTORY xv
xvii
xviii CONTENTS
Part V Conclusion
11 “Rational Globalization” and the Search
for an Alternative Way Out 229
Index 233
About the Author
xix
List of Figures
xxi
xxii LIST OF FIGURES
Table 10.1 The risks identified in Pirelli’s 2021 Annual Report 202
Table 10.2 The risks identified in NatWest’s 2021 Annual Report 207
Table 10.3 The risks identified in ENI’s 2021 Annual Report 212
Table 10.4 The risks identified in Ocado’s 2021 Annual Report 218
Table 10.5 The risks identified in Ryanair’s 2021 Annual Report 222
xxiii
PART I
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