High-profile incidents of corporate misbehavior around everything from sexual harassment to carelessness with customers' data have received a lot of recent media attention. As companies scramble to respond to such incidents, there's a big shift underway from a cultural and risk management perspective. Phil Rowley, Berkeley Research Group's Executive Director and Chief Revenue Officer has spent time in the trenches with these issues, building successful teams and setting them up for success. Consulting recently caught up with Phil to discuss some of these thorny issues.
Consulting: You've been exploring the topic of high-profile incidents of fraud or harassment at big companies, how did that come to pass?
Rowley: Part of that was related to specific opportunities where we were asked to come in, it varied whether that was by the board, a management team or outside counsel directing those efforts. Like many of us in this space, we had a series of calls looking for counsel, looking for what type of assistance could be offered. In many of these instances we're discussing, of course there's the immediate PR and how to respond, there's been criticisms of how companies have handled certain things in the public domain. What they were looking for from us is how do we put into place protocols and procedures that change that dynamic and help identify those types of issues. Are they cultural issues? Compliance issues? Business operation issues? My effort was to call into my network and ask how are you looking at these things. It was very much a self-education process so I could think about what would be our offering to the marketplace.
