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April
9-11 at The Ritz-Carlton, Sarasota, Florida
James Lee Witt, former FEMA director,
co-chairman, ProtectingAmerica.org
The renowned former director of FEMA, the
nation's leading authority on public safety and emergency, will
speak Tuesday, April 11 on how the nation can best prepare for and
protect against catastrophes.
Witt won international acclaim for his role
in transforming FEMA and coordinating the federal response to
more than 350 disasters during his tenure as director from 1993
through 2000. Today, he serves as CEO and Chairman of James Lee
Witt Associates, LLC as well as chief executive of the
International Code Council, an association dedicated to building
safety.
Witt, along with Admiral James M. Loy, is
also a co-chairman of "ProtectingAmerica.org," a nationwide
coalition of first responders, emergency management experts,
building officials, insurance industry leaders and others urging
for a comprehensive response mechanism at the state and federal
levels to prepare and protect Americans from the effects of
catastrophes.
ProtectingAmerica.org also promotes more
effective land use and building code enforcement, and improved
coordination among local, state, and federal authorities.
Professor
J. Edward Russo, Cornell University
Have you looked hard at how your management
team makes decisions? Do your managers show overconfidence in
their own observations? Do they demonstrate a bias for the status
quo? Do they anchor their thinking in past realities? Do they
follow the herd?
 If so, your organization may be prone to the
"decision traps" Cornell University professor J.
Edward Russo identified in his book Decision Traps: The Ten
Barriers to Brilliant Decision-Making and How to Overcome Them,
co-authored with Paul Schoemaker of the Wharton School.
For the 2006 conference, "Jay" Russo
will be leading a half-day interactive session where CEOs can
learn to identify the traps in their own decision processes, and
to structure those processes to produce the "winning
decisions" Russo and Schoemaker describe in their subsequent
book, Winning Decisions: Getting it Right the First Time.
Drawing on that latest book, Jay will lead
attendees in a session that will introduce concepts of sound
decision-making, then engage attendees in addressing the problems
of correcting for overconfidence and making conflict work to their
advantage.
John
Lucker, principal, and Jim Marino, director,
Deloitte Consulting LLP
Personal lines underwriting decisions have
been transformed over the past 10 years by the use of credit-based
scoring. Today, a similar transformation is taking shape in the
underwriting of small commercial accounts.
Deloitte Consulting LLP is leading the effort
to develop "predictive analytics" for underwriting
businessowners, general liability, and other commercial lines.
Some $30 billion in small commercial premium is being scored by
custom scoring models developed by Deloitte.
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John
Lucker |
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John Lucker, a Deloitte principal, and Jim
Marino, a Deloitte director and former P/C company CEO, are
key players in this effort, and they'll be on hand to discuss the
following:
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The competitive environment for predictive
modeling in commercial insurance;
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How focusing on classes of risk, rather
than individual risks, creates mismatches between price and
risk;
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How data mining and predictive modeling
can dramatically improve commercial lines underwriting
results; and
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How internal company data can be combined
with external vendor data to improve a model's predictive
power.
Matthew
Josefowicz, manager, global insurance group,
Celent LLC
How do you make good decisions regarding
technology when technological change makes operating strategies
obsolete more and more quickly?
Few organizations track the evolution of
information technology as closely as Celent LLC, the research and
consulting firm that has issued numerous reports on general trends
and specific applications of technology in insurance.
 Matthew Josefowicz, manager of Celent's
global insurance group, will draw on Celent's extensive research to
describe different scenarios executives may face in the coming years
regarding technology.
Among other things, Matt is the primary author
of Celent's annual survey of insurance chief information officers,
and has written extensively on the importance of data as a strategic
asset. He has spoken at several industry conferences, including
events sponsored by ACORD, IASA, A.M. Best, and others.
Ernst
Csiszar, president,
Property Casualty Insurers Association of America
 It is hard to remember a time when there were
so many public policy decisions weighing on the property/casualty
industry, and it's hard to imagine anyone better suited to address
them than Ernst Csiszar, president of the Property Casualty
Insurers Association of America (PCI).
Today, Congress and the statehouses are
wrestling with an unprecedented number of insurance-related
issues, including:
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Calls to restructure residential property
coverage to address losses from natural disasters;
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A proposal to eliminate state rate
regulation by federal law;
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Proposals to restrict companies' ability
to utilize underwriting information, such as loss history data
bases;
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Pressures to impose Sarbanes-Oxley
corporate governance regulations on mutual insurance
companies; and
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The evolution of federal reinsurance for
terrorism losses.
As a former college professor, insurance
company CEO, state regulator, NAIC president, and, now, as
president of a leading trade association, Ernie Csiszar is
uniquely suited to address these and other issues facing the
industry from a variety of perspectives he has experienced
firsthand.
A
panel of company executives
Our era is defined by the growing number of
decisions executives have to make, and the ever-greater speed in
which they have to make them. In the face of relentless
competition and innovation in the market, one faulty choice can
result in a severe setback for a company.
AAIS has invited seasoned
executives to discuss how their companies are positioning
themselves to compete and succeed in the coming years. Our
panelists include:
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Greg Ostergren, chairman, president
and CEO of American National Property and Casualty Company,
Springfield, Mo.;
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Kenneth Stover, executive vice
president, Western National Mutual Ins. Co., Edina,
Minn.; and
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James Sullivan, president and CEO of
Co-Operative Insurance Companies, Middlebury, Vt., who will
moderate the panel.
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In addition, every registrant will receive a
free copy of the book Winning Decisions, whose insights
will be discussed by co-author J. Edward Russo.
Conference
Program
Sunday
evening