Yesterday I read a nice article in the German manager magazin about a survey done by a consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal who asked compliance officers about key factors in successful compliance activities including two thirds of the German DAX companies. They found an strong relation between good compliance practices and former cases where those companies had to pay huge fines!
Well this is not strange thinking that way but why do all others have obviously not learned from those (very public) examples? It seems that many top managers still rather act on good faith into their own companies and processes. At the same time the majority of managers asked stated that they evaluate their compliance processes as rather non sufficient or non sufficient.
So action is still lagging behind cognition. That's not good as - to cite another proverb - the laugh is only on the loser!