Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are back putting the freak in economics. As they did in Freakonomics, SUPERfreakonomics uses economic analysis to give some insights into actual human behavior. When the original Freakonomics came out it was very original. Since then other books have hit the mainstream trying to do the same thing, … Read more »
Category: Compliance Programs
Public Companies Fail to Disclose Ethics Waivers
According to Usha Rodrigues from University of Georgia Law School and Mike Stegemoller from Texas Tech University – Rawls College of Business, in their paper Placebo Ethics, public companies are failing to disclose ethics waivers. They focused on Section 406 of Sarbanes-Oxley which requires public companies to disclose when they have granted an ethics waiver … Read more »
Whales and Compliance
I was surprised to be thinking about compliance while I was reading about whales. Sure, I eat, drink and sleep compliance. But there are some lessons that compliance professionals can learn from the study of whales. This came up while I was reading Watching Giants: The Secret Lives of Whales by Elin Kelsey. My original … Read more »
Perception, Dilbert and a Magical Management Necklace
Are your assumptions correct? You get a new tool to help manage your processes and everything starts working better. Is everything actually working better? Or is the data just being manipulated to look better? As is often the case, the pointy-haired boss can show us the problem. Often the compliance officer is like the pointy-haired … Read more »
Hulk Smash Compliance Program!!
Hollywood has done it. Now it’s your turn. Reboot your compliance program. There is the “reboot” you hear from IT support when your computer is malfunctioning. It seems to always be the first response from the help desk. But once you start back up, its exactly the same computer with exactly the same programs. Hollywood … Read more »
Happy Thanksgiving
That means an extra long weekend for me. The White House traditionally pardons their turkey. The tradition is credited to President Truman who received a White House turkey for Thanksgiving. But there is no evidence that he spared the life of the turkey. According to an in-depth investigative report by the Washington Post, it was … Read more »
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New Workplace Posters – EEO is the Law
Starting November 21, 2009, you need a new workplace poster: EEO is the Law. There are two new federal workplace laws the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act and the ADA Amendments Act. Federal law requires all employers covered by the federal anti-discrimination laws (those with 15 or more employees) to post multilingual notices describing the federal … Read more »
Criticism and Praise
Do criticism and praise work to affect performance? Leonard Mlodinow briefly addressed this topic in The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. He explores the studies of Daniel Kahneman who was lecturing the Israeli air force flight instructors on behavior modification. Kahneman was trying to make the point that rewarding positive behavior works, but … Read more »
Trust and Financial Regulation
Ronald J. Colombo of Hofstra University School of Law wrote a great paper on The Role of Trust in Financial Regulation. Trust is an important part of our financial markets. Scandals, massive incompetence, massive irresponsibility, massive fraud, have shaken trust in the financial markets. Commentators, policy makers, and industry leaders have all recognized the need … Read more »