The real-world ethics and compliance training series
Compliance Corner™ is a real-world ethics and compliance e-learning series, as initially told through the front-line perspective of Richard Bistrong, former FCPA violator and FBI/UK Cooperator. Additional vignettes have since been added to include the experience and perspectives of others, including Tom Hardin, a prior hedge-fund analyst, who shares his story of trading on confidential information with Nita Drakatos, a former ethics and compliance training and communication leader. It’s training for the Front-Lines from the Front-Lines.
Designed with the input of global compliance leaders, the series addresses issues of ethics and compliance to help compliance leaders bring their code of conduct to life through a holistic journey of real-world risks and real-world lessons. The series consists of twelve vignettes, including one workshop and a list of resources.
The vignettes’ goals are as global as they are simple: To help employees do what’s right in difficult circumstances- when it matters the most- and to help everyone make principled decisions in what’s a very competitive and complex world.
Unlike the usual “hypothetical” or “abstract” e-learning content, the Compliance Corner library is the sum of decades of experiences from those who have encountered real-world ethics and compliance challenges, both from the ’sharp-end’ of their careers, as well as from a training and communication perspective.
Winner of the 42nd Telly Awards for Corporate Training, honoring excellence in video and television content across all screens. Compliance Corner was chosen from more than 12,000 entries from five continents.
Explore the Compliance Corner Video Library
The content was produced and designed to complement existing ethics and compliance training initiatives. And that’s the great part of the Compliance Corner library: The vignettes can be integrated in any order with existing e-learning content, embedded as stand-alone training, or as a complement to live training, whether in a virtual, in-person, or hybrid environment. They were designed to deliver content to the right people, at the right place, and at the right time according to your needs.
Subtitles are available in English, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Arabic,
Czech, Dutch, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish.
Anti-Corruption Videos
In the introduction of Compliance Corner, I ask if everyone is ready to take a journey from corruption to compliance. And in sharing the topics for the series ahead, I prepare everyone for making the “difficult the discussable,” as to mitigate the blind spots of our decision-making, as to inspire and impact the workforce to make principled decisions in what’s a very competitive and complex world.
In this vignette, we address the challenges of taking aspirational values and operationalizing them through our conduct and choices. I share how corporate values are the “why” of compliance, moving beyond policies, rules and procedures by thinking about the ethical consequences of our decisions, and how ethics, integrity and values sound so much louder when they are shared through the voice of business.
I share why I didn’t pick up the phone and ask for help when I faced ethical dilemmas. This vignette addresses the hazards of short-term thinking where we can easily allow the power of what’s immediately important overwhelm what’s fundamentally important, including ethical and sustainable business practices.
Designed as an interactive workshop, I challenge attendees to ask “what would you do” when presented with what might appear to be innocent interactions, but which slowly, over time, can get between our desired behavior and our actual behavior. Topics include escalation of commitment, loss aversion, and other behavioral issues which can move us to the wrong side of ethical decision-making.
In this vignette, I address the stubborn question about the line between appropriate and inappropriate interactions. I challenge attendees to keep their ethical radar on and strong, and to think about how they might be unduly influenced, or unduly influencing others, and how that risk can’t be papered over or transferred. As I share, we all have a responsibility to ask the tough questions, to ourselves and to each other.
Teamwork: Why should that matter to us, and what does that have to do with ethics and compliance? In this vignette, I surface the need to think about how all our decisions are linked, and that success will be collective, one ethical decision at a time. I address how the more we question and challenge one another when it comes to ethics and integrity, the more we build trust.
I share the personal consequences of my conduct, including my family and health. And in doing so, I remind viewers to think about their own family, welfare and loved ones when struggling with ethical decisions. I remind everyone that we are never alone when it comes to unpacking ethical dilemmas, and that we have teams to keep us strong, successful and resilient through ethical and sustainable business practices.
In this final vignette, shared in “sunlight,” I encourage viewers to stay in touch via social media, and remind everyone how our social media interactions reflect upon us as brand ambassadors for our organizations. I remind everyone that stress and anxiety are like a wave — it crests, breaks and subsides. So, when feeling stressed and uncertain, we need to reach out to our teams, take a deep breath, and unpack our challenges together!
Insider Information Videos
In this interview, former Ethics and Compliance leader, Nita Drakatos, interviews Tom Hardin, formally known to the FBI as ’Tipper X,’ on how his decisions and decision making went from innocent to illegal, trading on inside and confidential information.
In this vignette, Tom Hardin challenges us to think – would we easily recognize inside and confidential information if we saw it, or heard it? Tom also shares how what we might think of as casual discussions about our work and employer, to those outside of our organizations, can lead to tremendous peril ahead.
Here, Tom Hardin shares what we might say to his ‘younger self,’ with the benefit of hindsight, and what that might mean to us in building a career centered on ethics, through four practical steps in how we address inevitable challenges to our values.
In this interview, Nita Drakatos asks Tom Hardin about his fascinating journey as an undercover informant for the FBI, and a ’nail-biting’ request to get into swimming trunks by a suspecting colleague while wearing a wire!