Ep 6: Alison Taylor: Culture and Corruption

Whether it’s Volkswagen, Siemens, FIFA, or many otherorganisations, we seem to be hearing more and more aboutcorruption. Are all organisations, particularly businesses, corrupt -  and what can we do about it?  My guest today has interesting answers to these questions, and we get into this fascinating area of risk.

Alison Taylor is, amongst many other things, an expert in anti-corruption.  Alison is a Director at an organisation called Business for Social Responsibility (www.bsr.org) and has several years of experience doing consulting work and investigations in this area.  She has a unique perspective to corruption by bringing both analytical and practical lenses to it – and emphasises the important role that organisational culture (i.e.“how things are done around here”) plays. She not only knows her stuff, but explains things clearly and with plenty of interesting stories and examples. I thought it was an excellent conversation and I’m certain you’ll enjoy it. 

We covered many areas including:

• What corruption is;
• How and why organisations become “corrupted”;
• Why many currently popular “compliance-led” approaches to corruption are falling short;
• Whistleblowers and why there are so few of them out there;
• Tell-tale signs of corruption (i.e. how to tell if you might beworking for, or with, a corrupt organisation);
• Cross-cultural (i.e. non-Western) attitudes towardscorruption

Show notes:

• You can find some of Alison’s articles on this topichere: http://www.forbes.com/sites/riskmap/2014/12/11/lighting-up-the-battle-against-corruption/#7e0783416ea5,here:  http://globalanticorruptionblog.com/tag/alison-taylor/andhere:http://www.fcpablog.com/blog/2015/6/22/alison-taylor-does-competition-cause-corruption.html
• Follow Alison on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FollowAlisonTandLinkedin:http://bit.ly/1UGu8hL
• The book “Beautiful Souls”: http://amzn.to/1o6Lkij
• Article in Rolling Stone, “A Whistleblower’s HorrorStory”: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/a-whistleblowers-horror-story-20150218
• Paul Polman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Polman 
• The article “The Nature of Corruption”: https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/ifwedp/201359.html
• Article "The Normalisation of Corruption inOrganisations": http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191308503250012 
• The site www.ipaidabribe.com

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