High Performance Operations: Leverage Compliance to Lower Costs, Increase Profits, and Gain Competitive Advantage

6. The Man Versus The Money

Painted into a Corner

There’s a paradigm in businesses dealing with compliance. That paradigm is to nearly automatically take a “comply for compliance’s sake” approach to anything perceived as a regulation—or even merely required, affiliated, or related to the other expectations of their regulated industries. The same can be said of many extrinsically motivated expectations.

Were such a study possible, I believe it would be found that organizations often behave much as individuals do when faced with extrinsic motivation—they don’t respond as well as they would when driven by intrinsic motivation. “I’m doing it for you, honey.” That has much less long-term benefit than, “I’m doing it to feel better about myself.” This ...