Shakespeare's Problems Plays: Part 1 - All’s Well That Ends Well and Compliance Resilience

This podcast opens a five-part podcast series on Shakespeare’s Problem Plays. These are plays where the structure of comedy ends the plays; i.e. everyone gets married at the end of the day. Yet these were really not happy endings. Equally they are not tragedies either. Usually in the middle is some very dark part, which tests the reader, play-goer or listener with some very difficult subjects. The five we will consider for the remainder of this week are “All’s Well That Ends Well”; “Troilus and Cressida”; “Measure for Measure”; “The Winter’s Tale”; and finally, “Timon of Athens”. In “All’s Well That Ends Well” Helena is a low-born ward of a French-Spanish countess. She chases Bertram across Europe, sends another woman into bed with him and then captures his heart by all this aggressive stalking. Yet Helena is largely broken by Bertram’s actions.   I thought about All’s Well That Ends Wellwhen I read a recent article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) by Roger L. Martin, entitled The High Price of Efficiency. In this article, he posited that the relentless pursuit of business process efficiency can actually make an organization less resilient. As they become less resilient, they are more at risk for a catastrophic failure or a likelihood of a control failure which could lead to something akin to a major ethical violation or even legal violation such as under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The points adapted for compliance are: 1. The first is to limit scale.  2. The second is to introduce friction. This is the situation where a company creates an artifice so clean that if something untoward enters the system, it can wipe it out. You should is to bring in someone from the outside to review your compliance program on a two- or three-year basis, to provide an outside perspective but also put some sand in your shoes at times.  3. The third prescription should be high on every Chief Compliance Officer’s (CCO’s) game plan. It is to “create good jobs.” 4. CCOs must also work to teach resilience in their organizations.   Tomorrow, Troilus and Cressida.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices