Leadership and Career

Recognizing the value in a sponsor – a more involved mentor – is the easy part. Mary Shirley offers guidance on how to identify and secure a sponsor to help guide your career development. For those of us in life sciences industries, sponsorship means paying for the continuing professional education of health care professionals (usually indirectly through health care organizations);...

The world is in better shape than we might think – an encouraging thought at the outset of a new decade. Linda Henman asserts that worry and a victim mentality impair our ability to take necessary risks. When conducting research for his bestselling book, Factfulness, Dr. Hans Rosling asked simple questions about global trends and systematically received wrong answers —...

Mariette Cutler, Managing Director of The Risk Navigation Group, discusses how relative inexperience in the audit profession can be a real asset – salve to the souls of those still gaining a footing in the GRC space. Early morning paired with the brisk fall air to set the tone for a third-quarter audit committee meeting. Most of us have been...

“Culture” is a seven-letter word that has gained traction in the C-suite and boardroom. As Protiviti’s Jim DeLoach explains, more than ever, senior executives and directors are acutely aware that culture plays a role in delivering outcomes – both good and bad – at the companies they serve. Every senior executive and director has read stories of companies behaving badly...

Reputation and crisis specialist Michael Toebe discusses the “stink test,” a practical technique for analyzing and making decisions in the corporate world. Well-formed decision analysis is not only a necessary, critical process; it is, if done expertly, far smarter, improved risk management. It works cohesively with and allows for strength of decision-making, increasing the odds of higher-quality outcomes in leadership,...

Vault Platform CEO Neta Meidav explores how to create a “speak up” culture in the workplace – one that ensures employees don’t fear retribution if whistleblowing or reporting harassment. Though the roots of #MeToo trace back upward of a decade, the movement hit its stride in the fall of 2017, prompting increased scrutiny around bad behaviors and spawning the creation...

Audrey Harris, partner and co-chair of Mayer Brown’s global anti-corruption & FCPA practice, talks all things anti-corruption – from Jay Clayton’s critique of regulators’ lackluster enforcement to the next frontier of compliance. CCI: Tell us about your background. How did you get your start in compliance? Audrey Harris: After Georgetown Law, I spent my associate and early partner years at...

While she was in Maryland recently for a conference, CCI caught up with Amii Barnard-Bahn, recently described by Forbes magazine as “one of the top coaches for legal and compliance executives.” Barnard-Bahn, a Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Coaching and a columnist for Compliance Week, was influential in steering the passage of California’s recent Bill SB826, the first law...

Mary Shirley of Fresenius and the Great Women in Compliance podcast offers solid guidance for professionals new to compliance. The interviewing process can be daunting -- but will be less so with advice from Mary. Your hard work tailoring applications to the job and company has paid off and you’ve been invited to interview. Congratulations on being shortlisted! How do you...

When you allow circumstances to define you, you lose the ability to respond objectively – and effectively – to a crisis. Linda Henman offers two contrasting examples of crisis management in practice: Merck missed the mark, but Tylenol triumphed. While we were writing The Merger Mindset, my co-author, Dr. Constance Dierickx, identified a new genre of people: the chronically aggrieved....

MetricStream’s COO, Gaurav Kapoor, discusses how the Chief Risk Officer’s role is changing; CROs are finding themselves increasingly focused on enabling growth while simultaneously ensuring stability. It’s a global trend: Consumers and investors are demanding better standards of corporate governance and integrity. This trend has effectively shifted the focus of the Chief Risk Officer (CRO) from traditional risk areas, such...

Looking for your first job when fresh out of college can be a demoralizing experience. Just finding suitable roles to apply for can be a herculean task in and of itself. So, when you do get an opportunity befitting an eager and keen prospect such as yourself, make sure you grasp it, and make your application count. Mary Shirley offers...