This is an overview of the posts I’ve written on Turkish culture and how it affects the efforts to establish and run an effective Ethics & Compliance program in this country. Culture, Compliance & Turkey: This first post, written in 2017, continues to receive a lot of attention. I have taken the topic up in […]
The sun sets in Istanbul for the final time in the year that made me really understand the meaning of VUCA … and what a Black Swan is not.
We hear a lot of news about the Covid-19 vaccines being approved these days and that they will “protect” those inoculated from the disease and make them “immune”. I am not an immunologist, but from a risk professional and behavioral perspective, what I see ahead of us is a serious phase of disillusionment after vaccination […]
I have been advocating for a long time now for changing the name of the game: leaving behind the misnomer “compliance management” and putting the focus on culture, ethics and risk or simply put: good decision making. To use an analogy from the world of sports, more specifically football (I mean the European version where […]
…Also, the “hour” will probably last more than 60 minutes… As the number of reported infections and deaths from the pandemic grow also in Turkey, people are facing a situation that disrupts their usual lifestyle and coping mechanisms much more deeply and thoroughly than any other crisis they have experienced before. As the Turkish Health […]
I found this post in my drafts. I had written it on March 16, 2020, but for some reason not posted it. It was the beginning of the lockdown in Turkey to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus in this country. My thoughts from then are resonating with the situation we are facing now; […]
As the novel coronavirus pandemic (even though the WHO cannot yet bring itself to call it so) keeps developing very dynamically worldwide, we see that in a crisis where people’s, yes entire populations‘ health and ultimately also some people’s lives at stake, the impact on stock markets exceeds the „usual“ risks that organizations face and […]
(This post contains a fair amount of irony. And some school Latin.) Why is it that management does not implement the corrective actions in our audit reports? writes an Internal Audit VP in a post on LinkedIn. Yes, why in fact is management so dumb not to properly value and apply the words of wisdom […]
In one of my earlier posts I have written about the “brand name” of the compliance department and why I think the words “ethics” or “integrity” should be part of it. (I meanwhile prefer “ethics”.) A few days ago I heard Christian Hunt from Human Risk talk about it in a recent episode of the […]
Orientation This post is the second in a series of posts on effective Ethics & Compliance in the context of Turkish culture. In the first part, I looked at the motivation for this analysis, and the cultural profile of Turkey in the Hofstede 6D model. In this second part, I will summarize the current requirements […]
Today, as the sun is setting for the last time in this decade on the other side of the Bosphorus, I am reflecting on 2019 and what it meant to me and who / what I am grateful for. The sun sets in Istanbul on New Year’s Eve 2019 for the final time in this […]
Originally written 8 May 2018, updated 17 December 2019 In a spring cleaning in 2018 I found an old diary of mine with entries from 2005 and then again from 2008. Back then in May 2008, almost 10 years before to the day, I had taken stock of my life up to that point of […]
September 13, 2017 As a foreigner working and living with his family here in Turkey, it is natural for me to learn to speak Turkish. I have met a couple of expats who have been living here for years and do not even try to learn the language instead trying to get by with English. […]
September 17, 2017 When we were still living in Germany, a colleague of Burcu’s once made her this “compliment”: “I am really positively surprised by you. I always thought all Turks were lazy and slow.” The colleague was apparently not at all aware at that time how discriminatory her comment actually was. We Germans tend […]
September 12, 2017 Ne mutlu yarım Türküm diyene. The first idea for this blog came actually up one year ago. To be more exact, it was Burcu who suggested that I write a blog. I don’t recall exactly when, but we had just moved from Lindau at Lake Constance to Isanbul, and in one conversation […]
Not all outcomes are created equal As human beings our thinking is subject to a host of biases. When it comes to the ethical dimension in decision-making, an important one is the Outcome Bias. It means that we judge the quality of a decision by its eventual outcome. It’s the outcome we arrive at that […]
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