Companies need to build resilience, enhance collaboration to manage risks

Amidst uncertainty due to the surge in coronavirus cases, companies need to manage risks by building resilience of the organisation and enhance the culture of collaboration, Tata Steel Executive Director and CFO Koushik Chatterjee said on Monday.

"Don't be surprised, because this is normal now to expect disruptions and ensure that the organisation's culture, governance standards and leadership standards are reset, assuming that these disruptions will happen in the future," he said while addressing a virtual session of industry body CII's 14th Corporate Governance Summit.

He also noted that it is very important for the leadership to keep calm.


"Also, the investments that we had done, again, that was planned as part of our invention or strategy to enhance our digital capability for the last few years became a very critical enabler... whether it was things like work from home or whether it was we entered digital and analytics paper to manage the business on a day to day basis, that became a very very critical part," he added.

Tata Motors Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO) P B Balaji, who was also present on the occasion, noted that risk helps deliver the strategy.

"The problem is that if you make it too sophisticated for people it will end up panicking everybody. It is better to make it nice and simple," he added.

Further, Chatterjee said that currently there are a lot of conversations happening around the board about the pandemic, geopolitical in view of economic issues and climate change, which is the next big mega-crisis that awaits the world.

"Therefore, both the management and the board need to look for megatrends that are happening all across the world across sectors. Because it is only then that the management and the board can raise their level of governance, and be able to distinguish between noise and signal," he added.