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I recently saw the performance of King Lear with Glenda Jackson as the mad king. It was a magnificent production and if you have the chance to see, I would certainly urge you to do so. The production had many interesting features and interpretations which seemed to be great entrees into several compliance topics. The play was directed by Sam Gold and it was scored by Phillip Glass but the star power was derived from Jackson as King Lear. It was a fabulous take on the story and one that will resonate directly to our turbulent times. Therefore, inspired by octogenarian Jackson and her performance, I am going to use King Lear as a deep dive into several compliance topics this week.  In this episode, I want to discuss how this production changed the focus of the play, away from the madness of the king to the actions of the three daughters.

Perhaps it was my perception of the play or perhaps it was the director’s intention but the focus in the first half of the play was clearly on the daughters and their families. Both Goneril and Regan played much more prominent roles throughout the first scene and their joint liaisons with Edmund, later the Earl of Gloucester, were key components of this production. Moreover, their husbands, the Duke of Cornwall and the Duke of Albany, also played prominent roles. The Duke of Cornwall, for instance his role in this production was more than the traditional highlight for him, which is the blinding of the original Earl of Gloucester. (Even in this production it still elicited gasps from the audience.)
Even after the intermission, where some of the most powerful scenes in all of Shakespeare playout, including the blinded Earl of Gloucester and the mad Lear wandering the moor, this production held a distinct focus on Lear’s daughters and their families, adding in the complexity of Edmund, the new Earl of Gloucester, having an affair with Goneril while secretly pledged to wed Regan.
In the most recent Harvard Business Review (HBR), Scott Berinato writes, in an article entitled “Data Science and the Art of Persuasion”, that most companies are not getting the value from data science initiatives and prescribes ways to remedy this phenomenon. Last year, at Compliance Week 2018, Hui Chen said on a panel that she expected the compliance team of the not-so-distant future would have a data scientist. As with most of her pronouncements, she was way ahead of the crowd.
You must start with the premise that most CCOs and compliance professionals are legally trained, usually without any data analytics classes in law schools still operating under the Socratic Method. Even if a stat class is thrown in somewhere along the way in undergrad, grad school or even through some business school outreach to law students, that does not begin to prepare someone to understand the insights available through advanced data analytics. The key is to build a better data science operation. There are four suggestions, with the over-arching theme of defining the talents you need to understand and communicate the data.

1. The unpacking of data and creation of insights is a skill.
2. Data wrangling.
3. Expertise.
4. How to communicate the information.

I recently saw the performance of King Lear with Glenda Jackson as the mad king. It was a magnificent production and if you have the chance to see, I would certainly urge you to do so. The production had many interesting features and interpretations which seemed to be great entrees into several compliance topics. The play was directed by Sam Gold and it was scored by Phillip Glass but the star power was derived from Jackson as King Lear. It was a fabulous take on the story and one that will resonate directly to our turbulent times. Therefore, inspired by octogenarian Jackson and her performance, I am going to use King Lear as a deep dive into several compliance topics this week. Today, I want to use the nature of the production, to introduce the day’s topic of innovation in compliance.

Gold’s Lear production was both unique and innovative. It was quite a large stage but the lightening was used to great effect. When the director wanted to shift the action, to another group of actors or topic, the lights were simply shut off to the actors not involved. They did not have to exit the stage and then return. This allowed them to remain on stage and the action could move back and forth without disruption.
The second innovation was in the use of music. While I am generally not a fan of music in Shakespeare, unless used in the original show notes, such as bugles blaring; I am not a fan of music in the performances. However there was a classical quartet which played throughout the performance that I felt truly enhanced the entire production. Finally, I normally revolt at any singing in a Shakespearian production. There were a couple of singing scenes which almost worked for me but at least they did not detract from the overall performance.
I thought about this in the context of how to move compliance innovation into the corporate pantheon of greater business process efficiency when I read a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article, entitled “Grow Faster By Changing Your Innovation Narrative”, by George S. Day and Gregory P. Shea. In the article they discussed their findings that organizations that sustain growth “faster than industry rivals articulate a coherent, compelling innovation narrative and rely on four powerful levers to make it a reality.” They posited four key levers for doing so which I believe would work well for a compliance function to sustain innovative growth within an organization and with its customer base, i.e. employees. I have adapted their piece for such an exercise.
The first lever is to invest in compliance talent.
The second lever is encouraging prudent risk taking.
The third lever is to adopt a customer centric process.
The fourth lever is aligning metrics and incentives with innovation activity.
The bottom line is that senior management is well-versed in the need for innovative and effective compliance. By using these four levers, a compliance practitioner can help senior managers to focus the organizations compliance efforts. The authors conclude by stating, “A growth-affirming  innovation narrative and the four levers that make it manifest within a company can help leaders focus and prioritize their innovation efforts. The process of identifying and articulating the narrative is essential to understanding the culture of innovation within a company and envisioning what it can achieve. The levers bring that narrative to life. Without them, organic growth leadership in any industry is a hit-or-miss endeavor.”