In May, the United Nations once again named Asia as the most ‘disaster-prone’ region of the world http://bit.ly/29hb45I. If your company has an office or a factory in Asia, or you have BCM responsibility for overseas locations, or you’re just interested in international BCM job opportunities, you’ll want to hear our September speaker, Nathaniel Forbes MBCI CBCP, who spent 20 years in Singapore running Forbes Calamity Prevention www.calamityprevention.com. What he learned in one sentence: “Despite risks of earthquakes, tsunamis, pandemics, terrorists, food scandals, civil unrest, copyright theft and intrusive governments, a company’s biggest risks in Asia are almost always hiding in the basement.”
Some stories you’ll hear from Nathaniel:
Risks
· How many N95 masks does it take to protect 350 employees from SARS, bird flu and swine flu? (Hint: 6,000 is definitely too many.)
· Why would a reputable company build a motorcycle factory without a fire suppression system?
· Could a company still operate in India if its facility ran out of water? (It’s already happened to Coca Cola.)
· How long does it really take to evacuate a 50-story building?
Recovery strategies
· What’s a safe separation distance if your country is only 35 miles wide?
· Why a consumer finance company in Thailand recovers at Carrefour (the ‘Walmart of France’).
· Could you use a shipping container as a recovery site? (Yes, but it’s really cold in the winter.)
· How do you explain “recovery time objective” in Chinese? Or Ukrainian?
Supply chain continuity
· Why would a consumer electronics company built a $1B factory 18 miles from an active volcano?
You can read the background for that story at “Tuning out supply chain risk”: http://zd.net/29i8TOR
Plus: Nathaniel’s own Very Simple Formula (VSF) for estimating time and cost to start a BCM program outside the United States.
Read about Nathaniel Forbes on LinkedIn or by typing “Nathaniel Forbes” into a search engine. Forbes Calamity Prevention is the Asia partner of recruiter BC Management, Inc. of California.
Nathaniel Forbes Bio
Nathaniel has managed Forbes Calamity Prevention in Singapore for 20 years. He provides training and consulting in organizational resilience – business continuity management (BCM), emergency management (EM) and crisis management (CM) – to multinational companies. And he makes presentations.
Nat was a Minneapolis taxi driver in the 1970s. He learned about resilience by being verbally abused, stiffed for fares, knocked unconscious (once) and mopping out his cab after hauling drunks. Unhappy with his Teamsters union local, Nat led a 56-day strike of 700 drivers in 1975 and was elected their leader. He says much of what he knows about leadership came from persuading frozen taxi drivers to stand hours on a picket line in the middle of a Minnesota winter.
In 2003 Nat shattered his arm falling off his bicycle. He worked for three days until his arm turned purple and had swollen to the size of his leg – then he thought an x-ray might be appropriate. He has a severe case of ‘white coat syndrome’ - a deep distrust of hospitals and doctors. He is also a cancer survivor.
Nat was the first President of International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) Asia Council in 2008. He is a CBCP and an MBCI and a licensed instructor in Asia and the United States for the BCI’s Good BCM Practice examination preparation course (coming to North America this year).
Nathaniel spent months in a Buddhist monastery in India in 1973. He wanted to learn more about the religion, but the head of the monastery only wanted to hear about Disneyland. From this experience, Nat has concluded that he will probably come back in his next life as a cockroach.
