Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance: It Can't Happen to Us—Avoiding Corporate Disaster While Driving Success

Keys to Getting It Right

Some companies have avoided these pitfalls and succeeded not only in reducing compliance costs, but also in enhancing efficiency and gaining real business benefit. Let's look at how they've succeeded in getting this right.

Strategic Perspective

Moving from seeing compliance as a costly but necessary evil, forward-looking management teams see the bigger picture, beginning with the realization that new laws and regulations arise from corporate actions that caused damage—to consumers, employees, investors, or the community. Each legislative or regulatory reaction raises the performance bar in such areas as product safety, human resource discrimination, information privacy and security, the environment, sales practices, and financial reporting. These insightful corporate leaders recognize that despite raising of the bar, the marketplace sees these new standards as a minimum, with consumers looking for those products and services that meet their higher expectations.

Successful managers get it, and their companies reap the benefits in terms of market share, profitability, and return. One can look to the auto manufacturer that has long been a leader in gaining better mileage performance, or another that has been a leader in vehicle safety. Companies that recognized the demand for healthier food products—both retail and restaurant based—have gained market share. And an airline instituting a passenger bill of rights continues to achieve high customer satisfaction ...