NYU Program on Corporate Compliance & Enforcement Keynote Address – October 6, 2017
Thank you, Dean Morrison. I appreciate your thoughtful introduction. I am honored to be here with so many distinguished enforcement officials, corporate practitioners, and scholars from around the world.
One of my favorite management parables is about a child who watches her mother prepare a roast beef. The mother cuts the ends off the roast before she puts it in the oven. The child asks why. The mother says that she learned it from her mother. So the child asks her grandmother. The grandmother explains, “When your mother was a child, I cut the ends off because my pan was too small to fit the whole roast beef.”
The moral of the story is that the solutions of the past are not necessarily the right solutions today. Circumstances change. We should not blindly accept past practices. We should be conscientious about reconsidering our assumptions. Continue reading