Mr. Douglas Barlow was the first risk manager to be inducted into the Insurance Hall of Fame.
Despite his retirement as a risk manager of the Canadian multinational company, Massey-Ferguson, in 1972, Mr. Barlow remained a scholar, innovator and educator up to the age of 83.His interest in risk management never abated.
In the field of risk management, Mr. Barlow was years ahead of his time in his innovations. He paved the road in the l950’s and l960’s for those risk managers who came in the 1970’s and l980’s.
He was a founder of the basic principles risk managers still are using-- and some say will continue to be used in the future. For example, when his firm, an agricultural manufacturing concern, planned to join a cooperative that owned a hangar for industrial aircraft, he saw a potential liability. Trained as a lawyer, he made sure the aircraft and hangar owners contractually released each other from liability for the property.
He was also credited with establishing the first global insurance and risk management program for all class of risk for Massey-Ferguson’s operations in 1962. What he built was later called the first true "risk management." program. He saw that Massey-Ferguson, one of the world’s earliest multinational companies, had a great deal of dependency upon several critical plant locations in various countries around the world and some resulting liabilities. After three years of development, he launched a risk management program, combining a dedicated attention to loss prevention and a fairly sophisticated international insurance program.
Also in the 1960’s, he created the now familiar concept of "cost of risk" which to him seemed obvious. He defined the cost of risk as the sum of insurance premiums, self-funded losses, risk control expenditures and other administrative costs. He united for the first time in one formula all of the factors related to the management of a risk.