Corporate Defense and the Value Preservation Imperative

About the Author

Sean Lyons is globally recognized as a corporate defense thought leader and strategist. He is acknowledged as the pioneer responsible for proposing the umbrella term "Corporate Defense" to represent an organization’s collective program for self-defense, and also for being the first person to propose the extended "Five Lines of Defense" oversight model which is currently receiving increasing levels of regulatory attention. Sean is published internationally, and has lectured and spoken as a subject matter expert at lectures, seminars, and conferences in Europe, North America, and Asia. These speaking engagements include topics such as corporate governance, enterprise risk management (ERM), compliance, security, business continuity, internal controls, assurance, and governance, risk and compliance (GRC). His work on corporate defense has been cited in a number of books and multitude of other publications on the above topics.

As the architect of the cross-functional discipline of Corporate Defense Management (CDM) he is widely regarded as the foremost authority in this emerging field. With more than 20 years experience in corporate defense activities he is a firm advocate of the requirement for corporate defense to play a more prominent role in corporate strategy. In an effort to help achieve this objective Sean has been an active contributor to public consultations in many of the above topics. In 2015 Sean was a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the inaugural publication of the Journal of Enterprise Risk Management, the first academic journal to focus solely on enterprise risk management.

In 2013 he was the invited keynote speaker at the Asian Confederation of Institute of Internal Auditors (ACIIA) Chief Audit Executive Leadership Forum in Mumbai, for their two day conference entitled "Enterprise Defense Management: Internal Auditors to the Fore" (a theme which was based on his CDM framework). In 2011 he was an invited member of the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN)'s taskforce on promoting the "ICGN Corporate Risk Oversight Guidelines". In 2010 the Conference Board published his influential paper entitled "Security as a Critical Component of Corporate Defense" which was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as part of their ongoing project to assess security risk exposure and business preparedness in the private sector.

Sean was shortlisted as a finalist in the GRC MVP 2009 Awards run by the US based GRC Group (SOX Institute) which was co-chaired by Senator Paul Sarbanes and Congressman Michael Oxley. These awards recognized individual achievements and professional contributions in governance, risk management, and compliance, and honored professionals who demonstrated excellence in this field. For a number of years Sean was also the resident contributor in the field of corporate defense for the RiskCenter, a New York financial risk management media company (then based on Wall Street).