Study: SEC Tweeting Cuts Misconduct

twitter

Let it never be said that arcane bits of academic research have no relevance to corporate compliance! A grad student at Yale has found that regional SEC offices’ robust use of Twitter correlates to reduced insider trading, customer complaints against investment advisers, and financial misreporting. I came across this study last week — on Twitter,…

Read More

Governance Lessons From the Postal Service

Postal Service

Radical Compliance always strives to find the latest, best illustrations of corporate governance gone wrong that we can dissect for lessons everyone else can learn. Today we have a gem: the U.S. Postal Service.  By now you probably know at least the contours of the story. The U.S. Postal Service is a money-losing operation, and…

Read More

Two Tales of Ham-Fisted Leadership

leadership

One might assume that the leadership challenges facing Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Roger Goodell at the National Football League don’t have much in common — but when talking about inept leadership in modern times, some universal truths do indeed emerge. First, let’s recap each man’s leadership bungles individually. We’ll start with Zuckerberg. The spark…

Read More

Facebook, Power, and Antitrust Issues

facebook

Compliance officers have a lot to consider about this week’s news that Facebook will pay $5.1 billion in penalties and implement a raft of procedures to improve its privacy compliance. Above all, however, consider this: the market didn’t care.  It didn’t. While we were all busy analyzing what Facebook’s settlements with the Federal Trade Commission…

Read More

What CBP Tells Us About Subcultures

CBP

This week we learned that employees of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection operate a closed Facebook group, replete with racist, sexist posts about migrants and Democratic politicians. For corporate compliance and governance professionals who think about the challenges of building a strong corporate culture, the mess at CBP offers a cautionary tale. The facts…

Read More

More Lessons From the Lunch Lady

lessons

We have more news on the tale of Bonnie Kimball, school cafeteria worker temporarily famous for getting fired because she allowed a student to run an $8 lunch tab for 24 hours. Now it seems perhaps Kimball was not entirely forthcoming about why she got fired — which, actually, gives compliance officers even more lessons…

Read More

Ethics and Stupid Social Media Posts

I came across a report this weekend — no, not that report — that ethics and compliance professionals might want to contemplate. It was a news report about a spokesman for the Federal Highway Administration, who has said offensive things on Twitter. The tweets came from one Doug Hecox, your standard-issue government functionary whom almost…

Read More

Adventures in Ethics and Social Media

Ethics and compliance officers might believe that this weekend’s standoff on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, between high school student Nick Sandmann and Native American activist Nathan Phillips, has nothing to do with their profession — no larger lessons for Corporate America, no insights about ethics worth our consideration. We’d be wrong. As messy…

Read More

Roseanne, Corporate Priorities, and Social Media

roseanne

ABC canceled the second season of the revived Roseanne on Tuesday afternoon, hours after Roseanne Barr shot a racist tweet across the Internet — yet another reminder that life comes at you fast in the social media age, so Corporate America should know its priorities and how they shape the decisions you make. Barr sent…

Read More