When I first read Primed to Perform, I had difficulty applying the concept of inertia to ethics & compliance. I later had the chance to meet co-author Neel Doshi, who explained how devastating to compliance inertia can be.
We’ve all seen it but we didn’t know to call it inertia. In compliance, it’s when you ask an employee, following a preventable accident or a violation of law, why they did what they did, and their answer is: “I don’t know. We’ve always done it this way.”
In the business world, the best way to break inertia is to create velocity. We create processes that force innovation. We can do the same in compliance. We can create processes that force us to constantly evaluate the robustness of our program.
What part of your compliance program has been untouched for more than 3 years? This is where inertia is settling in.
The Ethical Leader 