My Proposals for the 2016 #SCCEcei – What’s Your Fave?
I’m really excited about the three panel proposals I submitted last night to the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE), for its 2016 Compliance and Ethics Institute. Thanks to Amy Hutchens, JD, CCEP, Page Motes and Heather Powell for joining in. Our proposed topics were: An advance workshop on drafting and negotiating contracts with compliance […]
Tone at the Very Top: The Umpire Strikes Back
The other shoe has dropped. I wrote last month about concerns that the Justice Department may have gotten off to the wrong foot, tone-wise, following its “Yates Memo” declaration that it intended to prosecute individuals within companies for their organization’s wrongdoing. But, as Mike Volkov so well summarizes, the top enforcer on this playing field quickly found a case […]
Tone at the Very Top, DOJ-Style
As compliance professionals and leadership counselors, we focus on “tone at the top.” What the C-Suite says is critical to establishing an ethical culture in an organization. What is even more important to foster that culture is whether top executives speak and act consistently. We advise our leaders that even one act of apparent hypocrisy, or of “looking […]
Two Things Watching The Oscars Taught Me About Ethics and Compliance
Last Sunday, three of us compliance lawyer types had ourselves a virtual Oscar Party. We three – Amy Hutchens (CCEP), President of CLEAResources; Kirsten Hotchkiss, now an employment and employee relations counsel with American Express Global Business Travel, and I (President of LeadGood, and also CCEP)– conducted an experiment with the following hypothesis: IF the […]
The Oscars, and The Sting Rule of Ethical Leadership
Will the billion-plus viewers of the Oscars this year hear messages that promote a culture of ethics, or erode it? My compliance chum Amy Hutchens and I, and others we hope, are planning to have some fun with that question as we “Live Blog” during the Oscars telecast tomorrow (Sunday, February 22). You can follow […]
“How To Destroy Morale in 4 Easy Steps”
Thanks to @EthiFocus for bringing my attention to this bit of research in a Washington Post blog: How to destroy employee morale in 4 easy steps. These are also four do-nots if you care about Tone at the Top.
Bone at the Top
Occasionally, company leaders just do the darndest things. Things like short-term decisions that wind up wrecking a company’s reputation long-term. Things that must make the company’s efforts to build a culture of ethics internally, just seem to its employees like so much window dressing. These bone-headed decisions set a “tone at the top” you don’t […]
Everything I Needed to Know I Learned at Summer Camp (Part 1)
I’ve got a lot of summer camp in my life these days, and compliance on my mind, and the two keep intersecting. There is a lot of the art of marketing in leadership, and in corporate ethics. One example is the knack of coming up with a few words to summarize and represent your company […]
Anti-bribery enforcement is a real risk
I have sometimes gotten a sense of annoyance from executives — even the ones who are fairly ethically oriented — when it comes to the specter of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: the country’s primary statute to combat international bribery. The law can hold a US company culpable for the actions of its people overseas, […]
What becomes a CEO most (Part 2)
I promised in an earlier post to revisit a study, publicized by David Brooks, about what characteristics seemed to make for the most successful CEOs. The study is actually from July 2008, by Kaplan, Klebanov and Sorensen. It set out to compare the relative contribution to CEO success of what the study calls “execution” skills […]