During a CEB executive retreat for Risk leaders, British American Tobacco's (BAT) Group Risk Manager, Carlos Alberto Garcia, told us why he values CEB membership and how it saves him time and money. What prompted you to join today’s event? This is the first event I’ve attended with CEB but I have joined different webinars. I always find the content excellent and sure that I’m going to go back to office with a lot of new ideas that can be implemented that have worth for others, which is the most important. Of course the networking with the colleagues from different companies is such a great thing as well. How has CEB helped your team function more efficiently? One very good example was the training materials that we have just developed this year. We’ve received very good advice from CEB so we could we could improve the materials, and then the same happened with every single topic of risk management – we can go into the CEB libraries, while our colleagues research there and then this gives us a very good indication of what we can improve and what we are doing well and encourages us as well to share what we do as well with the colleagues in CEB. How has CEB helped you approach risk differently? We have made a lot of effort recently, for instance in tabling emerging risk reporting and giving life to this to this concept of emerging risk, so now we are discussing emerging risk in different committees across the organization, so everybody is becoming more aware and involved with the discussions on emerging risk. And they help us as well to bring some of the concept into the table because we have developed a methodology that talks about impact, about likelihood and we plot it on a heatmap. But then comes some new concept like risk velocity, even though we have not got to the point that we introduce risk velocity as a measurement in our methodology, now we’re talking about that, we bring that for discussion and what might be more important to have that because of velocity rather than only the impact and likelihood that we traditionally do. So these are a couple of examples that we are trying to get the most from the information we’re receiving from CEB. If you didn’t have CEB what would you do? If CEB was not there then I probably would need to start engaging with multiple consultants, multiple colleagues, try to do networking in a more difficult way, not with the pace that I gain with CEB. What do you personally most value about your CEB membership? Firstly it helps me to keep up to date, secondly I find so many things that I can apply in the organization, even though everything has its time scale so we cannot rush and implement everything at the same time but certainly it proves our roadmap and the third thing is that the same message is available for anyone in the organization so for me it’s much easier to say, guys have a look at this in the CEB site so you can go there we share a link everybody will go there and see the same information just as we saw it, so it’s easier to spread a message of what we want to do. How do you see ROI with CEB? I see a clear return on investment that we do with CEB, from a risk management perspective, for instance, one was the deployment of the risk maturity assessment which we did with CEB. If we didn’t do it with CEB then we might have needed to get a consultant and would bring a lot of ideas, might need to do some changes to adopt it if it is not ready, so that that significantly reduced the time that we invested on that, and we’ll continue investment investing in that. If I’m having a new consultant then it’s going be additional cost and in similar resource but taking more time and more resources. And of course with the information that is there as well I can imagine how much might the company be investing in in emerging risk report for instance every quarter, but we can table everywhere across the organization so this type of thing when you start adding up then you can you can see that it brings a lot of benefits for the organization.

• published: 22 Dec 2014
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