Goodbye 2020
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.
Category: General
The COVID-19 vaccine hype cycle
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 […]
Compliance doesn’t win the game… but noncompliance can lose it
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 […]
The Ethical Imperative of the Hour is Physical Distancing
…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 […]
The ethical dilemma of salespersons in times of COVID-19
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; […]
What Compliance can learn from the Coronavirus crisis
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 […]
Compliance is a horrific brand – why don’t we change it?
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 […]
Last post for 2019: The year I found my Ikigai
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 […]
The power of envisioning your goals
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 […]
Work-friends. Or: How language can change the way we perceive the world.
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. […]
Hard workers
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 […]
„Hans in Luck“ – A German in Istanbul
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 […]
What do Physics and Ethics & Compliance have in common?
Today someone else called me a “thought leader” for the first time. Boy, did I feel flattered and proud for a moment. It was in a comment on my LinkedIn post about my activity as a lecturer at the TEiD Akademi on Ethical Culture and Leadership and on Measuring and Reporting on the Effectiveness of […]
The Cart, the Horse and the Heat Map
While thinking about driving back from a week of vacation out of Istanbul to our house in the city, I am starting to look at the traffic and the inevitable congestion that will build up in the next hours as a few million people will return from their 9-day Ramadan holiday to their homes. After […]
Effective Compliance Trainers Treat People Like Adults
In his May 2nd “Compliance Perspectives” podcast, the SCCE’s Adam Turteltaub had an interesting chat with Steve Priest of Integrity Insight International. Amongst other topics, they discussed that a main failure of Compliance trainings has been treating employees “like children”, teaching them rules over rules, to best remember them by heart and telling them not […]
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