Yogi Berra died yesterday. In addition to being one of the greatest catchers in baseball, he was a 3-time Most Valuable Player (MVP), a 15-time All Star, a Hall of Famer and member of the All-Century Team, a player on 10 World Series champions and Manager in 2 more World Series. Even in a country with over 300 million people there are few universally recognized icons and Yogi was one of the few. But even more than his baseball prowess, was his prodigious misogynation of the English language. It is only a handful of people who had their own language named for them and from Berra we derived Yogi-isms. In an article in US Today online, entitled “The 50 Greatest Yogi Berra Quotes”, it collected some classics from which I selected my top 10 favorites; which, in no particular order, are:
I never said most of the things I said.
It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.
Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.
Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.
Even Napoleon had his Watergate.
I don’t know (if they were men or women fans running naked across the field). They had bags over their heads.
He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.
Why buy good luggage, you only use it when you travel.
You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.
It’s like déjà vu all over again.
As you can see, there is quite a bit of wisdom in these Yogi-isms. So here’s to Yogi, The Mick and all the rest of those great Yankees from the 1950s. I hope you are now teaming up with The Babe, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Hoyt, Dickey and all the rest for one of the greatest teams the Field of Dreams has ever seen.
I thought about his baseball brain which was quite adept, when I read a recent article in the New York Times (NYT) Corner Office Column by Adam Bryant, entitled “‘Piling On’ to Get Better Ideas”, which profiled Kathleen Finch, the Chief Programming Officer for HGTV, Food Network and the Travel Channel. She had some interesting ideas around leadership that I thought useful for a Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) or compliance practitioner to consider using in a corporate compliance practice.
Finch said, “One of my favorite things to do is to put a team together in an informal way, then figure out who can do what best. Not everybody likes that because I will oftentimes change somebody’s responsibilities pretty significantly. But I like people playing to their strengths. Some of my best performers are people who had very different jobs than the ones they’re doing now.” This is one area that I think CCOs do not usually consider approaching as an avenue for assistance. However I know of one company that brings in non-compliance specialists for rotation through the compliance function. But focusing on the strengths of such persons to aid in a compliance project might provide you with some added firepower going forward.
Finch continued this theme of using her team members’ strengths, when she talked about another technique she uses which she calls “piling on” meetings. Bryant wrote, “I bring about 25 people into a room and go over all the different projects that are coming up in the next six months, and the goal is that everybody piles on with their ideas to make those projects as successful as they can be. The rule walking into the meeting is you must forget your job title… It is amazing what comes out of those meetings.”
I thought about this in the context of a roundtable or other form of corporate interaction where a CCO or compliance practitioner will try and solicit information about enhancements to a corporate compliance function. Finch said, “I don’t want the marketing person just talking about marketing. I want everyone talking about what they would do to make this better.”
Interestingly Finch used a term which I do not think is used enough in the business context, which she called “smart risk”. She went on to say, “when things don’t go right, I’ll talk about what we learned from the mistakes. We celebrate our failures just about as strongly as we celebrate our successes because I need to encourage the team to keep coming up with the big ideas.” It seems to me that she is expressing how to manage risk better and more intelligently, which certainly is an endeavor that every CCO needs to commit to doing going forward.
Finally, Finch had some very appropriate thoughts on hiring and the hiring process that I think every CCO and compliance practitioner needs to take to heart. First she wants folks on her team that are not laser-focused into a disciplinary silo. She said, “I don’t just want someone who’s looking for a finance job to talk about the financials. I don’t want you worrying about your individual departmental goals. I want you worrying about the business. And that’s an important distinction because I don’t want people competing with each other. I want people thinking about the collective whole.”
The second thing she said that is that she asks interviewees what they would change. The reason she does this is because “I like to know that I’m hiring people who have the guts to speak up. We’ve built an environment in which you will not get reprimanded for disagreeing with your boss, so I need to know that people on the team have the courage to let their voices be heard.”
While the Volkswagen (VW) fraudulent emissions testing matter is still unrolling, it might be time to consider if anyone at VW had either of these qualities. First, was there someone who understood that disabling the emissions controls to produce better results, which were outside regulatory parameters, would get the company into a ton of trouble from sources other than consumers? But more importantly did anyone have the courage to speak up on the VW culture that existed over the past several years? Did anyone even know how they could raise such an issue?
Those final two thoughts might have helped VW. Instead the company may have to invoke one final Yogi-ism “We made too many wrong mistakes.”
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