Lessons from the ‘risk business’
What On Earth Can Go Wrong: Tales from the Risk Business by Richard Fenning, Eye Books, 128 pages.
Since its beginnings in the 1970s, the corporate security industry Richard Fenning calls “the risk business” has accommodated two distinct personality types. One is the document digger, never happier than when following the footnotes in obscure subsidiaries’ accounts to establish an asset’s true owner or a potentate’s ill-gotten gains.
The other is the Boys’ Own Adventure sort, who may or may not have aged out of a special forces unit but who now finds job satisfaction in “K&R” (kidnap and ransom) cases and extricating Westerners from sticky situations in the world’s trouble spots.
Fenning spent nearly 30 years — 14 of them as CEO — at Control Risks, where the second of those tribes is overrepresented. His daily diet of terrorist attacks, coups d’état and corruption scandals made for “an odd life on the frazzled edge of globalisation”, he writes in What On Earth Can Go Wrong.
The memoir has its share of derring-do, as he takes the reader on his Kevlar-clad journeys through Iraq and Libya, recalls flying sweatily into Russia with $20,000 stuffed down the front of his trousers, or explains how he helped a client in the mid-1990s whose ice-cream factory had been infiltrated by the Medellín cartel.
But Fenning is too attuned to the comedy in such capers to paint his career as particularly adventurous. He brings equal relish to the tale of the CFO who stole from his company to pay for a penis enlargement operation, or the moment when he had to inform a client that his wife had worked in adult films.
The risk-averse product of a Yorkshire Methodist childhood, who struggles to understand why his father volunteered to fly Royal Air Force Lancasters when so few members of Bomber Command survived
World War 2, favours selfdeprecation over heroics.
When he recounts the time three burly skinheads pushed their way into his Moscow office, one of them armed with a monkey wrench, he focuses the account on his trembling knees, and that a local colleague had to explain that his visitors were not about to abduct him: “They are plumbers, you moron.”
Or when Fenning spins the story of being driven blindfolded to visit “O Coronel”, a retired Brazilian army officer turned private detective, he tells the reader it was just like a Bond movie. But rather than being dressed in a tuxedo with a Walther PPK tucked inside the jacket, “I was wearing an illfitting suit and carrying an asthma inhaler.”
The modern risk business that Jules Kroll pioneered four decades ago did not become a multibillion-dollar industry because of hapless Englishmen abroad, however. Fenning spells out how the end of the Cold War, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Maastricht treaty opened up unfamiliar markets for Western companies and opportunities for firms such as his.
He became CEO just after the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had created “a game-changing moment” for security consultants, on whom diplomats, aid workers and contractors depended for their safety. In the background, the digital revolution was redefining the risks facing companies and,
of course, the finance industry’s “persistent recidivism” guaranteed a steady stream of work. Fenning’s sketches of countries are sometimes overly simplistic (“China does not take criticism easily”) but he is at his strongest when discussing the nature of risk itself.
Since Francis Drake, he observes, entrepreneurial adventurers have understood that their ability to generate high returns in volatile parts of the world depended on
“good intelligence, the right security and a cool calibration of the risks”.
But many still confuse risk with fear, he emphasises. “We put too much trust in our response to fear and are lazy in calibrating and triaging risk. The net result is that we react very often to the wrong things.”
In a corporate setting, he notes, managers want to seem bold rather than timorous. Rather than voicing their concerns, many also assume that someone else involved in taking a strategic gamble must have answered the questions that are privately troubling them.
And such head office debates about risk are miles away from the reality in far-flung subsidiaries, says the man who recalls hearing prominent Brazilian industrialists boast of their roles as bribe-paying junior partners in international consortiums.
“What matters here is less the tone from the top and more the tone from the middle — what the people actually charged with running the business do on the ground,” he points out.
It is a message officedwellers who opine airily about Brics, Mints and other acronymned frontier markets would do well to remember: for all that globalisation has done for their business and Fenning’s, it’s still messy out there.