In an industry driven by risk, the top companies in property casualty insurance succeed by good underwriting results and risk selection, said William Berkley, founder of W. R. Berkley Corp., which operates Continental Western in Urbandale and was named the Best-Managed Insurance Company in Forbes magazine’s Jan. 8 issue.

Berkley spoke to a group of around 100 college students and the public about the nature of risk and the role insurance plays at Drake University on Feb. 7.

Historically, Berkley said, many qualified people chose not to go into property casualty insurance because the average returns from 1988 to 2005 have been 8.2 percent, which is low compared to other fields, such as asset management, which has a 17.5 percent return. But the top 25 percent of companies in the business have had average returns of more than 15 percent over the past 15 years, he said.

At the same time, Berkley said, the risk in the insurance industry is great with more than 242 companies going bankrupt since 1993. “Unforeseen events are the kinds of things like asbestos,” he said. “The small kinds of things that cost you $150 billion. Those kinds of events that you cannot imagine, it’s really the thing that makes the industry exciting and gives us all opportunity.”

Berkley’s company has assets of over $15 billion and annual revenues of $5 billion; it is the country’s ninth-largest property-casualty insurance holding company.

To describe what drives him, Berkley said that when he bought his first company in 1968, it was to survive the next week. Now it’s finding ways to keep ahead of the competition.