Freshmen Caucus Organizes Risk Intelligence Lecture

Financial executive and Columbia University professor Leo Tilman spoke to students in Lecture Hall A on Friday, January 19. The event, organized by Freshman Caucus leaders Katerina Corr and Jonathan Schneiderman, garnered about 30 students who listened to Tilman’s lecture on risk management and risk intelligence.

The lecture marks the beginning of the Freshman Caucus’s initiative to introduce a lecture series, with professionals in fields such as politics and policy, mathematics, activism, and physics.

With the approval of the administration, Corr personally contacted Tilman, her uncle, to speak to students. “Because the Freshman Caucus lecture series is new, we didn’t have the opportunity to tell possible lecturers that we had been successful in the past,” Corr said.

Tilman is the Executive Chairman of Capitol Peak Asset Management, a global asset management firm. Before founding Capitol Peak, he was President and CEO of Tilman & Company, a global strategic advisory firm focusing on risk intelligence. Tilman is credited with predicting the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 in his book “Financial Darwinism.”

He reinvented risk intelligence, which is a field in business where a person must calculate the risks and benefits of a certain venture. Throughout the lecture, Tilman used an analogy of a fisherman to explain this concept to students. “[Performance means] catching as many fish as possible. There is relative performance because the fisherman knows that his neighbor is also an angler and catches 50 fish. So if he catches 10, 10 is pretty good, but it looks very bad compared to his neighbor. There are also many risks: don’t tip the boat over or [...] drop your bait into the water. [There is also] favorable perception. He cares about nature; he doesn't pollute [the] water. The same can be said of any entity. A company wants to outperform its competitors [by managing] a set of risks,” Tilman said in his explanation.

Tilman then established a connection between risk management and gene editing, using the example of cows with horns. “A colleague of mine noticed that cows hurt each other with horns if they are in an enclosed space,” he said. “We try to remove these horns, which is an incredibly painful and inhumane procedure. So [instead we] modify a cow’s genome to take away the horns.” Agricultural companies, pharmaceutical companies, and research hospitals require experts risk management in order to navigate the new world of accelerated evolution.

Students found Tilman’s message about the interconnected nature of business and science to be interesting. “What I thought he did very well was relate [risk management] to other professions because often when you think about the economy, you think about the jobs that directly contribute to the economy. You don’t normally think about [fields like] gene editing,” Corr said.

After receiving such a positive response to the lecture and a substantial turnout, the Freshman Caucus plans on continuing their lecture series. “The lectures are a great opportunity for Stuyvesant students to hear about topics that may interest them in the future. We're reaching out, now with a full staff, to experts in an array of fields ranging from politics to physics,” Schneiderman said.