Risk Exploitation in Business

In  the process of doing  business, it is inevitable that you  will be faced  with
unexpected and often unpleasant surprises that threaten to undercut and even destroy your
business.

That is the essence of risk and how you respond to it will determine whether
you survive and succeed. There are five ways in which  you may can
make use of risk to gain an advantage over your competitors.

1. Access to better and more timely information about events as they occur and their consequences, allowing you to tailor a superior response to the situation.

2. Speed with which you respond to  the changed  circumstances in  terms of modifying  how and  where you  do business; by acting faster than your competitors, you may be able to turn a threat into an opportunity.

3. Past experience with similar crises in the past and your knowledge of how the market was affected by those crises, enabling you to respond  better than  other firms in the business.

4. Having resources – financial and  personnel – that allow you to ride out the rough periods that  follow a crisis better than the rest of the sector.

5. Financial and operating flexibility; being able to change your technological base, operations or financial structure in response to a changed environment can provide a firm with a significant advantage in an uncertain environment.

The key with all of these advantages is that you emerge from the crises stronger, from a competitive position, than you were prior to the crisis.

http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/pdfiles/papers/strategicrisk.pdf