Making a practice of praising people—even for just doing their jobs, acknowledging them in appropriate ways and looking for what they are doing right—at all levels of management helps increase corporate profitability by around 20%. It pays to look for what is right even in failures, and build on peoples’ strengths.

Most discussions of risk and compliance in organizations focus on processes and procedures to prevent undue risk and to ensure compliance. But to get a culture which supports the overall aim needs more than just processes and procedures. It needs overall commitment, sustainability, engagement and a focus on relationships.

In the course of this paper, I want to look at all of these, but first I would like to give you an example of where a seemingly robust risk and compliance strategy was adopted by the executive of a large multinational organization only to find it nearly going disastrously wrong. Financers Ltd. (obviously not its real name) is based in the UK and is in the financial services industry.

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