Marcus Beard
Partner
Marcus is an experienced adviser in strategic safety and risk in the transport and other sectors, with key areas of expertise in safety development, leadership, governance and independent review.
Education
University of Bath
Bachelor of Engineering (BEng), Chemical and Bio Process Engineering, First Class with Honors
Past Experience
BP Chemicals
Undergraduate Engineer
Marcus is a Partner at Arthur D. Little, based in our Cambridge office in the United Kingdom.
Marcus has 21 years of experience in safety and risk consulting, serving clients in the rail and metro industries, but has also worked in road transport, oil and gas, energy, and construction.
His core areas of expertise include strategic safety risk management, corporate safety development programs, leadership, risk assessment, culture, safety validation, and decision-making.
Marcus has acted as a board adviser on wide-ranging issues associated with risks from growth, start-up, and assurance.
He has worked internationally, including across Africa and Europe, and in Hong Kong, Japan, and the US.
Marcus is a highly experienced trainer, having delivered many learning programs to senior managers across the UK, North America, and Hong Kong. He has served as an expert witness to court in a number of high-profile legal proceedings.
Outside of work, Marcus is a passionate photographer (www.genkiphotographer.com)
DO YOU KNOW YOUR RISK APPETITE?
Today’s business environment is evolving at a fast pace, driven by rapidly emerging technologies, geopolitical upheaval, and other unpredictable events, making it increasingly difficult for leaders to navigate risks effectively. Organizations need to make risk-related decisions within a clearly defined risk appetite that is well understood across both strategic and operational levels.
Reinvigorating enterprise risk management
Enterprise risk management (ERM) has been regarded for three decades as a vital practice for navigating the broad spectrum of risk faced by an organization and ensuring the right balance is achieved between risk mitigation, transfer, and retention. Most transport and mobility companies have captured a register of enterprise risks, but few successfully embed and integrate ERM into their ways of working in a way that delivers real and sustained value.
ESG: Last call to take effective action
Toward sustainable, efficient & resilient mobility systems
Most transportation systems and companies have defined elements of their sustainability strategy and launched initiatives related to improving efficiency and strengthening resilience. However, we believe these concepts — sustainability, efficiency, and resilience (SER) — should be considered not in isolation but with a holistic and integrated view.
AVOIDING SURPRISES – A CASE FOR NEXT-GENERATION RISK ASSURANCE
A more proactive approach is to systematically consider how assurance arrangements can be upgraded to minimize the chance of such events materializing. In recent years, the Three Lines Model from the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) has evolved to become a potentially valuable, overarching guide for assurance and governance, although many organizations struggle to practically integrate its key principles into their business operations and decision-making processes.One challenge is balancing the extent of separation and collaboration between the three lines.
Risk: Strengthening business resilience after COVID-19
Despite that they had invested in comprehensive crisis management planning, the spread of COVID-19 found many companies ill-prepared, even though it was a known risk with extreme consequences and a reasonable likelihood of occurring. Looking at the evidence, the authors consider the underlying causes of this poor preparedness and set out the key elements of a new business resilience approach suitable for the post- COVID-19 world.
Next-generation business resilience management
Responses from large companies to the COVID-19 crisis have brought into sharp focus serious shortcomings in current risk and business continuity management approaches, such as lack of suitable data and intelligence, inadequate appreciation of risk velocity, and not enough agility to adapt to rapidly changing situations. Well before the crisis, Arthur D. Little (ADL) pioneered and deployed a new business resilience management approach with, at its core, an innovative predictive analytics tool powered by machine-learning technology to address these shortcomings.
Risk as a value generator
Beyond carrots and sticks
Many organizations that have undertaken safety improvement initiatives have found that while easy wins are typically accomplished early on, further progress often becomes increasingly difficult. Safety improvement typically depends on changing human behavior, which is driven by underlying emotion, habit and instinct, and not wholly rational or predictable. “Carrots and sticks” and other traditional methods therefore have limited impact on influencing behavior, and fail to truly engage employees and managers.
Assurance of your growing business
As corporations extend their footprint into new geographies or new types of operations they face many challenges, not least of which is the potential for unexpected losses that can damage operations, corporate reputation, brand and business performance. Establishing strong and safe operational performance in a new business from day one demands a focused approach to managing change during mobilization.
Leading for Safety
Businesses everywhere are seeing their safety performance plateauing. Busy agendas and behavioral drivers frequently mean that energies for further safety improvement initiatives are diverted elsewhere. Beyond the moral and legal imperative to protect life and limb, safety is a robust metric for highlighting the financial health of operations - there is money to be made in safety – and also to be lost. The increasing focus on the role of leadership for delivering effective safety is clear. By leadership we’re talking of what leaders do and how leaders behave.
Marcus is a Partner at Arthur D. Little, based in our Cambridge office in the United Kingdom.
Marcus has 21 years of experience in safety and risk consulting, serving clients in the rail and metro industries, but has also worked in road transport, oil and gas, energy, and construction.
His core areas of expertise include strategic safety risk management, corporate safety development programs, leadership, risk assessment, culture, safety validation, and decision-making.
Marcus has acted as a board adviser on wide-ranging issues associated with risks from growth, start-up, and assurance.
He has worked internationally, including across Africa and Europe, and in Hong Kong, Japan, and the US.
Marcus is a highly experienced trainer, having delivered many learning programs to senior managers across the UK, North America, and Hong Kong. He has served as an expert witness to court in a number of high-profile legal proceedings.
Outside of work, Marcus is a passionate photographer (www.genkiphotographer.com)
DO YOU KNOW YOUR RISK APPETITE?
Today’s business environment is evolving at a fast pace, driven by rapidly emerging technologies, geopolitical upheaval, and other unpredictable events, making it increasingly difficult for leaders to navigate risks effectively. Organizations need to make risk-related decisions within a clearly defined risk appetite that is well understood across both strategic and operational levels.
Reinvigorating enterprise risk management
Enterprise risk management (ERM) has been regarded for three decades as a vital practice for navigating the broad spectrum of risk faced by an organization and ensuring the right balance is achieved between risk mitigation, transfer, and retention. Most transport and mobility companies have captured a register of enterprise risks, but few successfully embed and integrate ERM into their ways of working in a way that delivers real and sustained value.
ESG: Last call to take effective action
Toward sustainable, efficient & resilient mobility systems
Most transportation systems and companies have defined elements of their sustainability strategy and launched initiatives related to improving efficiency and strengthening resilience. However, we believe these concepts — sustainability, efficiency, and resilience (SER) — should be considered not in isolation but with a holistic and integrated view.
AVOIDING SURPRISES – A CASE FOR NEXT-GENERATION RISK ASSURANCE
A more proactive approach is to systematically consider how assurance arrangements can be upgraded to minimize the chance of such events materializing. In recent years, the Three Lines Model from the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) has evolved to become a potentially valuable, overarching guide for assurance and governance, although many organizations struggle to practically integrate its key principles into their business operations and decision-making processes.One challenge is balancing the extent of separation and collaboration between the three lines.
Risk: Strengthening business resilience after COVID-19
Despite that they had invested in comprehensive crisis management planning, the spread of COVID-19 found many companies ill-prepared, even though it was a known risk with extreme consequences and a reasonable likelihood of occurring. Looking at the evidence, the authors consider the underlying causes of this poor preparedness and set out the key elements of a new business resilience approach suitable for the post- COVID-19 world.
Next-generation business resilience management
Responses from large companies to the COVID-19 crisis have brought into sharp focus serious shortcomings in current risk and business continuity management approaches, such as lack of suitable data and intelligence, inadequate appreciation of risk velocity, and not enough agility to adapt to rapidly changing situations. Well before the crisis, Arthur D. Little (ADL) pioneered and deployed a new business resilience management approach with, at its core, an innovative predictive analytics tool powered by machine-learning technology to address these shortcomings.
Risk as a value generator
Beyond carrots and sticks
Many organizations that have undertaken safety improvement initiatives have found that while easy wins are typically accomplished early on, further progress often becomes increasingly difficult. Safety improvement typically depends on changing human behavior, which is driven by underlying emotion, habit and instinct, and not wholly rational or predictable. “Carrots and sticks” and other traditional methods therefore have limited impact on influencing behavior, and fail to truly engage employees and managers.
Assurance of your growing business
As corporations extend their footprint into new geographies or new types of operations they face many challenges, not least of which is the potential for unexpected losses that can damage operations, corporate reputation, brand and business performance. Establishing strong and safe operational performance in a new business from day one demands a focused approach to managing change during mobilization.
Leading for Safety
Businesses everywhere are seeing their safety performance plateauing. Busy agendas and behavioral drivers frequently mean that energies for further safety improvement initiatives are diverted elsewhere. Beyond the moral and legal imperative to protect life and limb, safety is a robust metric for highlighting the financial health of operations - there is money to be made in safety – and also to be lost. The increasing focus on the role of leadership for delivering effective safety is clear. By leadership we’re talking of what leaders do and how leaders behave.
More About Marcus
- University of BathBachelor of Engineering (BEng), Chemical and Bio Process Engineering, First Class with Honors
- BP ChemicalsUndergraduate Engineer