“Everyone knows the world isn’t the same as it was a week ago,” said Riskonnect Chief Executive Officer Jim Wetekamp, “never mind years ago.” As the head of a risk management software company, Wetekamp is at the forefront of an industry that he’s seen change markedly since his early days working in accounting for IBM.
It was at Big Blue that he learned a professional lesson the hard way, as the best ones often are. A coding mistake led to an error that stopped a presentation he was giving from loading correctly, but he tried to power through anyway, hoping that the bug would fix itself, to no avail. “Though it was only a small error,” he recalled, “it showed me how important it is to move on if something isn’t perfect, instead of trying the same thing again and expecting a different result.”
This malleability has helped the Indiana University Bloomington graduate in a career spanning three decades, from IBM eventually to BravoSolution, where he’d work for 10 years, the last 4 of them as CEO. In 2018, he joined Riskonnect, where, rather than being alienated from his employees because of his title, he feels closer to them.
“Many people believe that being a CEO is the loneliest job, but I would disagree,” he said. “In this role I’ve learned to stop viewing my community as my four office walls. We all have different strengths and weaknesses, CEOs included. You don’t magically become an expert in everything the day you accept your new leadership position. As a CEO, I’ve experienced true collaboration in a way I did not understand before finding myself in the C-suite.”
That collaboration helps when you’re constantly innovating, as Riskonnect has done under Wetekamp’s leadership, having just last month launched an Artificial Intelligence Governance Solution “to help organizations manage AI-related risks and compliance requirements.” The new tool allows leaders to stay ahead of new and evolving AI regulations, customize and enforce AI policies, run automated audits, monitor AI risk and ethics, and track AI usage requests.
That’s the sort of product, and Wetekamp is the sort of executive, that accounts not for the world as it was years ago or a week ago, but the one a week or years from now – and that’s truly big-picture stuff.