DISPATCHES
Four New
Ideas

by ERICA SALMON BYRNE

_{SPRING 2025 | DISPATCHES}

Four New Ideas

by ERICA SALMON BYRNE | Chief Strategy Officer & Executive Chair, Ethisphere

In early April, I was fortunate to take the stage with my colleague Kevin McCormack to open our 16th annual Global Ethics Summit. We'd both just watched the opening video which included a line that hit me right in the solar plexus: Our community needs community right now.

That sentiment was behind the founding of our Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (fondly called BELA) eighteen years ago—a recognition that it isn't easy to be an ethics and compliance professional, and it is even harder when times are turbulent, budgets are tight, and too many think of the vitally important work we do as a cost center.

That was the sentiment in 2008, and it was decidedly the vibe again, but with one big difference: many of the people in the room had earned the proverbial seat at the table over the course of the last two decades by demonstrating their value. Now, to quote the great Larry Thompson, What are you going to do with it?

Larry, and the incredibly talented panelists and presenters that followed him over the course of the next few days, had some ideas:

We're all in this together. Our community does need community right now. But really, don't we all need community every day to do this work? My goal for every Global Ethics Summit is for every attendee to go home with five new friends and four new ideas. And that applies to me, too. Every year, someone at GES says something that strikes me anew and reminds me how fortunate we are to be learning from each other.
Be humble. Admit your failures and avoid the "but I can fix it!" pitfalls. There is so much to learn from our mistakes if we're willing to look them squarely in the eye. And if you're not comfortable learning from your own failures, use someone else's. The photo on the top page of this article is from a live Ethicast Reacts session in which Ethisphere Editor in Chief Bill Coffin and I covered a ton of under-the-radar news stories that showcase things going wrong in organizations of all shapes and sizes. Ask yourself not if it could happen at your organization, but how it could happen to you—and then develop a mitigation plan.
Focus on culture. We had multiple panels over multiple days talking about ways to shore up a speak up culture where people are comfortable challenging leadership, raising concerns, and asking for assistance—ideally, before something goes wrong. Isn’t that every compliance officer's dream? Eight million questions and no issues?
Dial in on your risks. Yes, the world feels like it is changing quickly, and new technologies are accelerating the pace of change, but here's the thing: we know how to do this. AI governance is...governance. Sanctions compliance is...process. Changes in enforcement are just changes, and if we were all in this only for the photos of people in handcuffs, we should have gotten out of this business a long time ago. This work is about mitigating people-created risk, the risk that your people, or your partners, are out there in the world acting on your behalf with insufficient guidance to make the right choices. The choices may be different as your business evolves, but at the end of the day there are only so many ways people are going to people. You know how to do this.

I'll be returning to so many of the sessions from this year's GES over the coming months, and I will probably exceed that “four new ideas” threshold before long. To all of you who took the time to join us (whether in person or online), thank you. I wish I could have bottled the energy of these few, short days. I hope you went home with that perfect five/four mix too. And if you're still a little short of either, please join me in watching the replays! Maybe you'll find that 'ah ha!' moment too.

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