KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE

To hear RIMS Canada Conference co-chairs Susan Meltzer and Nancy Chambers speak to each other in a telephone conference call is to understand why the theme of this year’s September 2008 RIMS Canada Conference is ‘The Exchange — Where Great Ideas Come Together.’

This year’s RIMS Canada Conference will held Sept. 21-24 at a sold-out Sheraton Centre in downtown Toronto. Education through collaboration will be the predominant purpose of the conference, which would be no surprise to anyone who hears Meltzer and Chambers speak to each other on the phone.

In a free-flowing conversation, the two former RIMS Canada presidents discuss the value of their own professional education and development. During the conversation, Meltzer and Chambers listed a number of well-known names of influential RIMS members who served as their mentors and teachers — including each other.

Chambers, for example, remembers having Meltzer as a teacher for one of her courses on risk financing. Despite Meltzer’s self-acknowledged reputation for tough marking, Chambers nevertheless managed to win an award from RIMS for the highest level of academic achievement in the early 1990s.

In fact, Meltzer and Chambers almost sound like university students as they recall snippets of favourite RIMS conferences, seminars, helpful gestures by colleagues, as well as words of wisdom they have received over the course of their careers. They even share an unvarnished glimpse into a few of their recent administrative triumphs related to the organization of the 2008 conference. In some ways, the unguarded banter between them is indicative of the kind of collaboration they say they witness daily in their risk management profession.

“At my first RIMS meeting [in 1983], I walked into it and I met Drew Douglas who was then the soon-to-be-retired risk manager of Shell,” Meltzer recalls. “He decided, since it was his last meeting and it was my first meeting, that he was going to introduce me to absolutely everybody he knew. It was an interesting approach. The reason I’m saying this is because [it illustrates] the same thing that Nancy [just] said: it’s a very collaborative profession, both internally, within the organization, and externally, with the people you meet and the things that you get to do. We risk managers share.”

That’s because a broad base of knowledge and experience is a fundamental pillar of the profession, Chambers says. “You never know when that phone rings what’s going to be on the other line. It’s a challenge.”

Chambers says attending RIMS Canada meetings and conferences has been invaluable in providing the kind of knowledge and experience required to do risk management well. “Susan, do you remember the guy [at a previous risk management meeting they attended]?” Chambers suddenly asks Meltzer during the conference call. “He stood up at the meeting and said, ‘I’ve had an implosion. I’ve dealt with explosions before. But I’ve never dealt with an implosion.’ And another guy stood up and said: ‘Yep, I’ve had one of those. Come talk to me afterwards.'”

The above exchange demonstrated the fundamental value of learning from colleagues in the profession, Chambers says. She still remembers something Meltzer told her a long time ago: “Susan made a comment that stuck in my mind forever and ever,” she says. “It was: ‘I don’t have to be an engineer. I don’t have to be a lawyer.

I don’t have to be a hedge fund expert. I have to know when I need one.'”

From her very first days as a commercial insurance broker for Morris & McKenzie Ltd. in 1975,Meltzer has proven adept at learning and working with others to help her achieve her broader professional goals. “When I graduated university, I came to Toronto,” Meltzer recalls. “I was looking for a job. I got a job as a filing clerk in an insurance brokers office. I cut my teeth in the brokerage industry and, several years later, I was off work because my son was born. I got a call and somebody said to me: ‘There’s a job opening in the risk management department and I don’t know what that is, but I think you’d be really good at it.’

“So I applied for it and it was at Canada Development Corporation. I took the job — that was in 1983 — and I never looked back. I was their coordinator of risk and insurance. I had no idea what it was. All I knew was that it had something to do with insurance. I didn’t even know if I actually realized I’d be buying their insurance programs when I took the job…

“I started my first risk management job in April 1, 1983.April 1 also happens to be Douglas Barlow’s birthday. And with Douglas being the grandfather of risk management, I always thought that was kind of symbolic to have started April 1st.”

Within two months, Meltzer quickly started networking within RIMS, attending her first ORIMS meeting. At that meeting, Barry Shakespeare came up to her and said: “If you really want to get what you need out of RIMS, you should volunteer, because that’s when you get the most out of what you need.”Meltzer took the advice: in 1985, after her work at the committee level, she joined the ORIMS board in 1985. She became the ORIMS president in 1989-90 and then RIMS Canada president in 1999-2000. Meltzer figures that she has obtained no fewer than three jobs since 1983 because of her network of contacts at RIMS.

Chambers’ professional background is very much a product of the educational environment. She started working in the University of Guelph’s finance department in 1986. “At that time, the insurance market was very tight and the universities in Canada were looking at alternatives,” she says. “That’s when they started thinking about the universities reciprocals, or CURIE [Canadian Universities Reciprocal Insurance Exchange].” A reciprocal is one of a variety of self-insurance arrangements.

“So I worked for the [university’s] assistant director of finance, who was responsible for insurance, and I got involved in this at the university. I figured this was an area that I am really interested in and I thought if it’s evolving, then I should evolve, too. My broker at the time was at Aon. And he said, “Nancy, you should join ORIMS.’ And I said, ‘What’s that?’ And he said, “Well it’s an organization of risk managers. You should go.’ So I went to my first meeting and I was hooked.”

Through her association with ORIMS, Chambers helped develop the university’s first risk management program. Chambers went on to become RIMS Canada president in 2004-05.

Given the prominence of education in shaping their professional careers, it is not surprising that as RIMS Canada Conference co-chairs in 2008, Meltzer and Chambers are stressing the educational and networking opportunities available at the conference this year. They have opened up the Monday afternoon plenary sessions at a reduced rate to more junior-level people in brokerage houses and large risk management departments. The idea is to give people who may not otherwise attend the RIMS sessions an opportunity to meet and learn from each other and the profession’s senior members.

Meltzer says the 2008 conference will have more plenaries than usual, “because we think you can provide higher quality [of education] when you promise someone a larger audience.” Also, the committee has taken a different tack at developing the concurrent sessions and the programs. “They didn’t take a call for papers,” Meltzer says. “They approached risk managers across the country to design, develop and participate in the programs to add to the relevance [of the conference].”

In keeping with ‘The Exchange’ theme, and also in keeping with Toronto’s reputation for having a diversity of cultural backgrounds, conference delegates will note the education this year comes with an international flavour. Meltzer confirmed one plenary will have risk managers from Belgium, Brazil and the United States speaking about the profession’s best practices in various parts of the world.

There will not be a traditional insurance CEO panel as in other years. Instead, the sessions’ themes will focus on economic issues, “C-suite views on risk,” [i. e. perspectives on risk from chief executives, chief financial officers, etc.], as Meltzer describes it, as well as a discussion about the evolution of enterprise risk management.

And there will be fun, of course. “Our mission is to prove that people from Toronto aren’t stuffy,”Meltzer says, tongue in cheek. Torontonians are “also very elegant, too, as you know,”Chambers chimes in. And so delegates can expect to see a very elegant, “virtually-black-tie” gala. They can also expect to see a Hollywood theme at the exhibit hall, recognizing that the 2008 RIMS Canada conference will be held right around the time of Toronto’s International Film Festival.