Glenn Klinksiek, URMIA president (1998-1999), reflects in his distinctive style on URMIA’s development over more than two decades, its education plan, and more with host Jenny Whittington. Now retired, Glenn led risk management efforts at the University of Chicago from 1988-2012, at which point he became URMIA’s part-time education manager through 2018. Glenn discusses why and how such educational resources as the Risk Inventory and Core Competencies for Higher Education Risk Managers were developed.
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Glenn Klinksiek, URMIA president (1998-1999), reflects in his distinctive style on URMIA’s development over more than two decades, its education plan, and more with host Jenny Whittington. Now retired, Glenn led risk management efforts at the University of Chicago from 1988-2012, at which point he became URMIA’s part-time education manager through 2018. Glenn discusses why and how such educational resources as the Risk Inventory and Core Competencies for Higher Education Risk Managers were developed.
Show Notes [member-only content, login required]
Connect with URMIA & URMIA with your network
-Share /Tag in Social Media @urmianetwork
-Not a member? Join ->www.urmia.org/join
-Email | contactus@urmia.org
Give URMIA Matters a boost:
-Give the podcast a 5 star rating
-Share the podcast - click that button!
-Follow on your podcast platform - don't miss an episode!
Thanks for listening to URMIA Matters!
Jenny: Welcome to URMIA matters! This is Jenny Whittington, URMIA’s Executive Director, and I’m so pleased today to have a special guest, Glenn Klinksiek, one of URMIA’s former staff members, is with us, and Glenn is going to introduce himself in a little bit about his history in higher education risk management and URMIA, so welcome, Glenn.
Glenn: Good morning, Jenny. Good to be here.
Jenny: Great. So, tell me about how you got involved in risk management. I know that was the beginning of your career, and then tell us about what led you into the fun madness of higher education risk management.
Glenn: Sure. Actually, my career began in insurance, and I was in various underwriting positions and really felt that I wanted to do more for individual corporations and so I began to explore the, what was then a new field of risk management. I got into the field working for a public utility in Indiana, coincidentally, worked in that for several years and ultimately came to work at the University of Chicago in 1988, and I retired from the University about 25 years later in 2012. I was the AVP for risk management in an audit. I started off as the director of risk management, but over time responsibilities came to me for internal audit, safety, compliance, after what I alluded to initially, after leaving the University, I spent five years as an education manager for URMIA at the national office.
Jenny: You know I always thought that was pretty interesting, that you had audit as part of your responsibilities. Did you have any, was any of your education around accounting, or any auditing principles?
Glenn: Well, I had a little auditing, a couple courses as an undergrad, and of course there were additional accounting courses in my MBA coursework. But the way it came to me was the University had, for a variety of reasons, terminated all of its internal audit staff, and so had nobody in that role, yeah.
Jenny: Wow.
Glenn: So, the University decided rather than try and rebuild the department, to outsource it and entertain a number of proposals from major accounting firms, including PwC and some others. In their presentation, these firms continually referred to risk management, risk management, and risk management, thinking if it in terms of context of internal audit. Ultimately the University elected to hire PwC as the outsourced internal auditor. The CFO didn’t want to take on the daily responsibilities for oversight of the function, and because they were talking about risk management so frequently, she said essentially, “I’ve got a risk manager person” and that was me and the rest is history.
Jenny: Very good. So, Glenn, I first recall meeting you, it was in my early years with URMIA, I’m not sure if it was 2005/2006/2007, but it was early in my career with URMIA at a Chicago regional meeting. At that time, we called those meetings “Murmia”. Can you talk about the evolution of “Murmia” a little bit?
Glenn: Sure. Going back to, even before URMIA existed, there was a regional get-together or risk managers in the Midwest, and this group, with the East coast risk managers, worked together to form URMIA in light of the difficult property insurance market, following the student protests on campus in the late 1960s. That group continued here in the Midwest, ultimately settling on the name murmia, it basically was a one-day roundtable discussion that we would have in person. URMIA, you know, expanded its roles and also provided opportunities for frequent feedback from others to typically though what was then called the??? . So, the need to get together periodically locally diminished somewhat and murmia was sort of on its last legs. Thankfully the national office picked up meetings, organizing meetings, for this group along with others in other regions, to keep that going even to this day.
Jenny: Yeah that’s terrific. I know I’ve heard stories about murmia meetings where you guys would meet at a restaurant and then you would all chip in like five dollars or ten dollars and split the lunch bill. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at those meetings; I’m sure they were full of good information and knowledge sharing. So, I know that was a fun group way back then.
Glenn: It was you signing the contracts for the hotels every meeting, I was on pins and needles whether we would get enough money in the pot to pay off all of our obligations.
Jenny: Well we’ve come a long way since then. So, um, why don’t you reflect on your time that you’ve spent with URMIA, going back to you University of Chicago days.
Glenn: Well, as I said earlier, I came to work for the University in 1988, and I knew a lot about insurance and risk management, but not much about higher education, and what risk higher educational institutions face. Shortly after I joined the University, I went off to the RIMs conference, which was in Washington D.C. that spring. That was my first introduction to URMIA. URMIA at that time working through the structure of the RIMs conference put on a couple of days’ worth of programming and it was there that I began to have direct information sources about university risk, as well as meeting other risk managers in higher education.
Jenny: Great. And when was your very first URMIA conference, do you remember what year that was?
Glenn: Yes, 1988 in Sacramento, California.
Jenny: Oh, interesting! We’re going to Sacramento for our regional conference in 2020. Small world.
Glenn: Well, I don’t think I can remember the names of any of the watering holes we frequented but trust me there are some there.
Jenny: I’ve heard as much. I’ve heard a lot about the food and beverage scene in Sacramento. We’re looking forward to going there.
Glenn: Well I, that conference being the first one really sold me on URMIA. It was there that I met a lot of folks in the field, many of which I’m still in contact today. I also understood the value it as the source for information and guidance. Some of the members then who were very senior, who were mentors to me, and I’m forever indebted to that- to their giving me the help I needed at that time.
Jenny: Yeah, that’s a great thing about URMIA, is meeting some of the seasoned folks that have been in the field for a long time, and they really enjoy giving back, so I think it’s a win-win for our members on both sides.
Glenn: I agree. After a couple years in URMIA I decided to see if I could contribute more, and so two years later in 1990 at the URMIA conference that was held in Miami Beach, I pitched to the Board the idea of having the annual conference for 1992 in Indianapolis, then I told them the advantages that I saw in that and that it was a centrally located place, easy to get to, that the prices were more affordable there then they were many other conference destinations. Cost then was a much more significant factor for the success of URMIA than it is today. We worked hard to keep the cost to hundreds of dollars and maybe $100 a night for a hotel room, and so forth. But, Indianapolis offered us those opportunities, and the third thing that Indianapolis offered was the fact that the hotel were we held the conference was downtown and easily accessible from there to the venues that were available for those who wanted to take a few minutes away from the association and conference activities.
Jenny: Yeah, I’ve had the opportunity to look at the brochure from 1992 and we have a very similar theme going in 2020 in Indianapolis and exactly for all the reasons you said is one of the reasons that the board did select Indianapolis for 2020, and we’re also, I’m not sure all of out members know this, but we are incorporated in the state of Indiana, so we get to save on some sales tax having an event in Indiana. So, we are proud to bring the conference to Indiana in 2020 and we have a great, new beautiful hotel, the JW Marriott. It’s a little more than $100 a night like it was back in 1992, but the city has really come about, and I think anybody who hasn’t been to Indianapolis for a conference in the last 10 years really needs to come and check it out.
Glenn: I’m actually planning on attending the conference, at least in part, Jenny. I don’t know, I may be the only one old enough there to be able to measure the current state of conferences to that that existed nearly thirty years ago. I’ll keep my comments that occur to me to myself when I’m there.
Jenny: Now, I’m glad that you’re planning to come back. We will have some type of retiree soiree of some sort in Indianapolis and we’ve had a great gathering of our retirees over the last several years, so I’m happy to know that you are coming. So, I know that you’ve told me that you did a presentation at the 1992 conference, can you reflect a bit on that?
Glenn: Well, it was actually at the 1990 conference.
Jenny: Oh, ok.
Glenn: Yeah, at that time there was an emerging issue related to research commercialization. That is were colleges found investors or otherwise undertook ways to take inventions that came out of the research side of the university and find a commercial application. University of Chicago was involved in that for some time and frankly in a much smaller way than it is today. But, the concern that I had was in terms of products liability risk, in other words if some invention that got licensed public companies’ product, and that product hurt somebody, could that university be held accountable for injuries that might occur, and that really hadn’t been discussed at URMIA in any meaningful way before the conference, I, and I was encountering that issue at the University, so I wanted to share with others what my observations were. I engaged a panel including an underwriter, insurance broker and of course myself. I remember that the underwriter and broker went on in their introductions about all the great things that they did in their role, and I simply introduced my job at the University as being there to facilitate the expansion of human knowledge.
Jenny: Wow. That is really interesting, and like you said, that is so commonplace now, you know, that activity on campus. So, it sounds like you were an innovative risk manager at those times, really trying to protect your institution. So, that’s terrific.
Glenn: Well, you may say innovative, but at the time it felt a little panicked. ]
Jenny: Well, innovative, panicked. It’s all good, right?
Glenn: Right.
Jenny: Ok, so why don’t we talk a little bit more about how you got involved in the URMIA board. What year was that, Glenn? I can’t recall.
Glenn: Well, I don’t actually recall either, Jenny, but it was shortly after my discussions at the Miami conference. At that time there was, these positions were more or less appointive, and so I was happy to take on the responsibility. Of course, as you know, there was no national office, there was no paid helpers in any way. It was all volunteer, and it was all work on our shoulders, but I was happy to do it. I saw that as providing an opportunity to of course deepen my resume, but build some experience in a leadership role that would help me on my every day-to-day activities at the University, and in a way it was low-risk because, you know, if I screwed up somehow in some big way, that would be unlikely to get back and affect my paid job, my professional career.
Jenny: Well, that certainly makes good sense, and that’s exactly what I tell people when they want to get involved in URMIA. It’s a great way to gain experience working with other people, getting great ideas from other higher education professionals, so I think those are great reasons why you got involved. So, I believe then your next adventure with URMIA was chairing another conference? Tell us about that experience.
Glenn: Yes, I took on the responsibility for chairing the annual conference here in Chicago. That was in…
Jenny: I think it was in 1997.
Glenn: Thank you. Yes, I took on the role of chairing the annual conference in Chicago in 1997. I was supported by a very good volunteer group. We came up with some innovative ideas, including having a grid in the program that laid out days and presentations so that people could track it better, and as things go, we had some challenges with the conference. Our keynote speaker was late to arrive and I was sweating bullets to whether that would happen.
Jenny: Oh dear.
Glenn: But, the other twist was we were hosting the Gala on Tuesday night at Shed Aquarium which is essentially across the street from Soldier Field and subsequent to us making the arrangements, the Rolling Stones decided to hold a conference there, making the logistics of getting conference scores back and forth to the event somewhat challenging, but everybody made it there and made it home too.
Jenny: Terrific. Well, you have been an asset to many a URMIA annual conference, and I know you and I really started working together back in 2013 at the Phoenix conference. So, this is after you retired, and URMIA was able to pull you from out of retirement to help support our conference in Phoenix. And, for everybody’s knowledges who’s never been part of the bag stuffing exercise that we do before every annual conference, Glenn was the mastermind of bag stuffing. He took bag stuffing, the assembly line, to a whole new level, but why don’t we switch and talk a little bit about the Phoenix experience and your retirement, and how that all progressed.
Glenn: Well, I retired from the University in 2012, and came up against the big questions any retiree has: where to live, how to make ends meet, and what to do with the great gift of time that comes with retirement. I’ve, like every retiring risk manager I suppose, thought perhaps I would do some consulting work and, you know, I did find a couple of engagements, but it really wasn’t enough to really keep me busy, and tried to find things that I could do that were meaningful. I decided I would reach out to Jenny to see if I could help with the conference schedule for 2013 in Phoenix. I was living in Phoenix at the time, so obviously attending would be an easy thing for me to do. I, my first involvement with the conference was on the programming committee. I remember saying this or that based on my experience, but my experiences were quite dated, and I found a lot of that had passed on. I was delighted to see, then, how improved the conferences were over what we had put together in the 1990s. Not that we had bad conferences, but the one I attended there in Phoenix was so much better and I was also intrigued to see what a great asset a professional national office was to the organization, and again taking it back to the days when all that work was done by us on the side, those of us in the leadership roles. It was a tremendous change, a real eye-opener.
Jenny: Well, that’s great to hear. I’ve been a big part of URMIAs growth since 2005, and it’s been fun to watch the organization grow and flourish, and I’m very proud of our conferences, so I’m happy to hear that. So, it was right around that conference, I believe, that Pat Fowler was retiring. She was our knowledge center manager, if I’m remembering her title correctly.
Glenn: Knowledge center content manager.
Jenny: Very good. Very good. So, yeah, for the membership at large, Pat Fowler was also a retired risk manager from Michigan State, and she was our first retired employee at URMIA, and she needed to do her second retirement, and she had announced that about the time when Glenn got involved in the Phoenix conference. So, why don’t we talk about how you got started being a part of the National Office, Glenn?
Glenn: Anita Ingram, who was the incoming President of URMIA reached out to me, and I guess after having some kind of conversations with you, Jenny, and some others, and asked me if I was interested. Of course I really didn’t know what a knowledge center content manager was, so I did some exploring and I learned that its main function was to keep the library content up to date, to help out members when they would have questions, and it also came with a paycheck.
Jenny: Yeah.
Glenn: I won’t characterize it, but it didn’t make me rich. So, it was a great way, I found for me, to stay involved in a professional field. It was a professional organization that I loved and respected, and it also helped give me something meaningful to do. I refer to it often as a paid hobby.
Jenny: Yeah, and it was a win-win. I mean from the early days when Pat Fowler was involved and we just started creating the infrastructure of the URMIA library, I mean you really took her, the foundation that she had started and really kept building it and you added new layers and new levels. So, let’s talk about how you took the position and kind of changed that for URMIAs good.
Glenn: Well, in any professional position I had, I always took it upon myself to be on the lookout for ways to do things better, look for opportunities, or improvement, both for me and also for the organization. Sometimes it worked in my detriment because it just meant more work for me. One of the things that I saw was a need for an education plan. The programming at that time was done almost exclusively off of responses to a call for presentations that URMIA would do. That didn’t mean we had bad presentations, they were very very good, but it meant though that they were responsive to more hot topic issues than basic, fundamental skills and knowledge that the risk manager should have, and thinking about it, I thought it would be good to have a plan that laid out a framework for providing some sort of schedule over time. The inputs for this came from the resource guide that is currently on the URMIA website along with the Core Competency publication, which is also on the website.
Jenny: Yeah, that’s very good, Glenn. So, you were the, you got the Board of Directors to approve the education plan, and I believe we are in year three or four of implementing it, and it’s been terrific to have that framework to build our plan, and we’re still looking to evolve it and take it further out than the annual conference. So, there will definitely be more to come on that.
Glenn: That’s good to know.
Jenny: Is there anything else you want to talk about? About your position, your evolution from the resource manager to the education manager and how that worked out?
Glenn: Well, the other key thing I think that I took on while I was in the role of education manager at URMIA was the risk inventory. We were frequently seeing requests from our membership about how do you go about identifying risks, what are the risks facing higher education, and I’m sure anybody who is listening to this knows what a common question higher education is, what’s happening at other institutions. Quite literally it was a case of continual reinvention by our membership. I took this as an opportunity to pull together from various sources and permission what the risks were based in higher education. I looked at insurance company publications, professional firm publications, and drew from my experience at the University and from the number of risk identification exercises I’ve gone through. I put together this list of risks. There were hundreds of different risks classified in 23 different risk areas, and addressed in each of the specific risk classifications, such as strategic risk, operational risk, etc. I understand, Jenny, that the board has put together a working group.
Jenny: So, Glenn, you’re absolutely right. URMIA has established a group to look at the risk inventory. So, they’ve actually made their first, their initial recommendations, so the membership can look forward to us marketing the risk inventory, kind of dressing up, aesthetically as well. So, we will be doing kind of a full out marketing blitz about the risk inventory, and we’re going to be interviewing in a future URMIA matters podcast how members are using the risk inventory, you know making it a really useful document. I know that I’ve taken the risk inventory on the road with me when I made presentations on URMIA, and people are very interested in it, because you are absolutely right. I mean almost everybody has a list of risks, so it’s a great tool, you know, to have meetings with other groups on campus, you know, just kind of going through their list and assessing where you are in that. So, thank you for bringing the risk inventory to URMIA.
Glenn: It was a great project for me to work on and I’m really glad that it will continue to serve our members well into the future. Terrific. Well, I look forward to updating that product and getting that out to the membership in 2020. So, last, I wanted to ask you about some of your favorite URMIA stories, your successes. So, why don’t you talk about your final presentation at the Salt Lake City conference, can you tell us a little about that, Glenn?
Glenn: Sure. Following the newly hashed education plan, called for a 2018 presentation on the emerging risk of artificial intelligence, and I searched all over for somebody to present to our conference on that. I even reached out to an individual in Israel to do it, but I couldn’t find any interest, so it left me to take up the task to do it and I did. I stepped back from the notion of artificial intelligence, and recognized it as an emerging risk for higher educations, so what is an emerging risk and why is artificial intelligence an emerging risk, and what can be done about it? That was the theme of my presentation, which is still in the URMIA library, so listeners might want to check out identification of emerging risk and artificial intelligence in the 2018 Salt Lake conference folder in the library. I had a great time doing it. I learned a lot about artificial intelligence; it’s still a hot topic. I have a google alert that sends me 20 or 30 articles on it on a daily basis, and if you watch the democratic candidate, presidential candidate debates, you’ll find Andrew Yang talks about it in almost every one. So, this is still a current topic, an emerging risk, and I was glad to have shared it with the membership. It, for me personally, was a full circle bringing me back to my first contribution to URMIA back in 1990, the presentation I did there, and I’m happy to say, and humble to say at the end of my presentation, I got a standing ovation from the audience, and it was, for me, a great way to end my professional career in risk management. Today, Jenny, as we sit here, I’m a fully retired old guy.
Jenny: And a very faithful Badger fan, right?
Glenn: Yes, indeed.
Jenny: As well as the Hoosier loss.
Glenn: Yeah, I live on the 26th floor to get down to a lower level for fear I throw myself out of the window, but it didn’t happen.
Jenny: Oh dear. Well, Glenn, it has been my absolute pleasure having you as my guest today on URMIA matters, and for everyone in the URMIA world, I urge you read up on Glenn’s issues that he shared today, any presentation that he was involved with was made richer because Glenn was an awesome moderator, as well. He would always ask very engaging questions; he was very prepared. So, Glenn, I mean thank you from the bottom of my heart for working for URMIA at the end of your career. We were so fortunate to have you and for you as being a futurist and really an emerging thinker in the URMIA world, I just want to thank you for being a part of URMIA and look forward to many more years of you attending the conference or being my guest on URMIA matters. So, thanks very very much.
Glenn: Well, thank you Jenny for that and if anybody listening would want to reach out to me, my contact information is still available on the URMIA website, so feel free to drop me an email, and if I can help in any way, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Jenny: Awesome. Well, Glenn, you enjoy your retirement, and we’ll be talking to you soon. This is it for URMIA matters, thank you!