Insisting on consistency: there are advantages to belonging in the middle of the pack: it forces the whizzes around you to keep things basic and simple.

When he was called in to fix Tyco International's fragmented, inefficient global claims management process, Paul Buckley knew, in his own words, that the biggest obstacle he had to face was the limitations of his own intelligence.

"The problem is I am not that smart, I have to keep things simple for me," Buckley said.

Buckley may be pulling our leg, or not, but what he has accomplished at Tyco has made him part of the class of the first ever Risk Innovator award winners in our manufacturing category:

The first thing that Buckley did in reorganizing Tyco's global claims management was to get every professional involved in managing Tyco's claims, "everybody that touched the account," in the same room. Then he told them what his goal was and that he expected them to develop a plan to get there and to execute it.

"I put them in a room together and said 'Guys, it's five years down the road, we have an organization that is the industry leader, tell me what it looks like.'"

What it looks like is a claims management structure that is quarterbacked out of Buckley's office in Princeton, N.J., and has an international claims consultant working out of a Sedgwick office in Boca Raton, Fla. The other leg of what Buckley refers to as a "three-legged stool" is the office in Cardiff, Wales, where staff members with Cunningham Lindsey collect data on Tyco claims throughout the globe.

In Cunningham Lindsey's unusual partnership with Sedgwick, that data, which is collected by Cunningham employees on the ground on every continent except where the penguins live, is then funneled through Boca Raton and onto Princeton.

In keeping with Buckley's insistence on simplicity,-differences in semantics internationally have been erased. Creating a system where everything was called by the same names was key.

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"What we call something in English has a very different nomenclature in English English. One of the first things that we had to develop was a common nomenclature," Buckley said.

But Tyco's program has got lots of other elements.

"The way I would view it was to create a program that allowed for a consistent delivery of services regardless of where the claim was located," said Joseph Labetti, a senior vice president in Sedgwick's Memphis headquarters.

"It was geared to try and create a unified, consistent comprehensive program that applied the risk management philosophy any where on the globe," added Labetti.

It's now almost a year since Buckley's program came together and he says actuarial studies are projecting that Tyco is going to take 20 percent to 25 percent out of the cost of managing its claims.

Buckley dearly and firmly credits the team he created and manages, not himself. "I'm just an idea guy," he said.

But others do praise him even if he won't beat his own drum.

"He has got one of the smartest risk minds I have ever come across," said Labetti. "He constantly pushes the envelope. The idea that it can't be done is not in his vocabulary and he is a really what I would view as a team builder."

Here's what Sandro Meyer, a New York-based global relationships manager and senior vice president for Zurich, said about Buckley.

"Paul is probably one of the most creative risk managers I have met in my career. On one side he is a risk taker. As an insurer he runs a captive and knows what is a good risk and what is a bad risk. Not only in respect of return but the most important part is that he knows how to make a risk better," Meyer said.

He also said Buckley's international reach is impressive.

"In other countries you have to have the buy in from these people who work together with you and one of the reasons is that they respect him: He is constantly ahead of the curve."