The triumph of the humble Chief Risk Officer.

This chapter analyses the role of two CROs, and the tools and processes they implemented in their respective organizations. Both saw that risk management had to be transformed from a collection of ‘off-the-shelf’ tools into a living and legitimate organizational control process. In both CRO cases, their riskwork involved a significant degree of humility, manifest in their limited formal authority and meagre resources. Their skill was to build an informal network of relationships with executives and business managers, allowing them to resist being stereotyped as either compliance champions or business partners. Instead they created and shaped the perception of their role as a careful balancing act between keeping one’s distance and staying involved. The riskwork of these CROs involved little or no packaging of standardized risk management ideas for business managers and was more focused on the creation and internalization of a specific type of ‘risk talk’ as an accepted, cross-functional language of business