While we all enjoy a good rant about silly health and safety regulations, directors must recognise the need to take staff and customer safety seriously

To be successful in any business endeavour requires the promotion and active management of risk at levels often way beyond those acceptable to the average non-director. Indeed, the rewards a business leader enjoys depend on their ability to grasp those risk-laden opportunities and make the most of them. Life outside the incubator depends on a healthy mixture of positive engagement with risk, courage in the face of uncertainty and enough maturity to plan a fall-back position in the event that disaster strikes.

It is this measured, often unnecessary, but all-embracing approach to risk that defines the great business leaders. From Bloomberg to Branson, they have all recognised that avoiding it by "saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing", to paraphrase American writer Elbert Hubbard, is the biggest risk of all.

In my experience, their contrasting approaches to risk are what differentiates private sector operations from the public sector. In the private sector, the big risks can be identified against a failure to achieve a few bold objectives-the upside. In the public sector, it is the downside risks, set against a morass of process and political fear, that drive behaviour.

The Chinese wish the challenge of "interesting times" for their friends. Yet, there remains this inherent tension between risk and reward. The faster you drive your car, the higher the risks to your passengers and other road users. And the faster you drive your company, the higher the risks to your staff and the public. And make no mistake: as a director, the buck stops with you. You have already accepted responsibility for what might go wrong tomorrow. Think about it for too long and you'll realise how exposed you are.

But what of the tabloid ridicule that routinely heaps one apocryphal health and safety story on another, from the fireman disciplined for breaching policy by jumping into a river to save a drowning woman, to the banning of the use of step ladders for the installation of smoke alarms on the grounds of unacceptable risk? And where do you stand on the continual drive towards a zero speed limit? More important, when was the last time you assessed the risks in your business?

The good news, according to a friend at the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), is that despite the popular image of an over-zealous approach to health and safety in the UK, we are, in fact, blessed by a comparatively light touch. Consider the position of your Italian competitors, who face a rule-bound system and surprise raids by large teams of undercover inspectors. There is, for example, a €3,000 fine for every fire extinguisher on a building site that is hung at the wrong height. Forget if extinguishers are missing, malfunctioning or are of the wrong type-this is a fine because they are hung in the right place. But a few centimetres above the regulation height and the site is liable to be closed down until the fine is paid. No wonder they need 400 armed Carabinieri to protect their inspectors. Evidently, it is risky to be in the Italian safety business.

Your personal opinions and the understandable irritations about the annoying tendency of the "nanny state" to interfere where it is unwelcome have no place at work. Yes, it's annoying that we require a licence to move a light socket or replace a pane of glass in our own homes, but such views need to be left behind once we assume the mantle of responsibility for the safety of others. Blaming a mix of the "counter-intuitive committee", ambulance-chasers and staff who wouldn't know stress if it interfered with their iPods, is unlikely to wash in court, or with the families of the injured.

It is easy to be lulled into a false sense of security. But when something hits the fan, as it does in the UK each year-typically to the tune of £700m in compensation, 200 deaths at work, and 30 million working days lost-you will want a clean conscience. If something does go badly wrong, I promise you'd prefer to be in the position of saying to yourself: "We assessed the risks and took reasonable actions to reduce them."

At its heart, health and safety is about nothing more than making common sense common practice.