No one in the compliance field seeks out pressure, scandals or crises, but these types of problems come with the job. In her career, Suzanne Rich Folsom has taken on these challenges head-on.

After serving tenures at global conglomerations including the World Bank, American International Group (AIG) and private security firm Academi (formerly Blackwater Worldwide), Folsom was recently named general counsel and senior vice president of governmental affairs at U.S. Steel. While the organizations she has worked for vary by industry and size, Folsom has a consistent record of ameliorating crises for companies in transition.

Folsom's dive into ethics and compliance happened shortly after being named deputy general counsel and chief regulatory and compliance officer of AIG, where she ultimately implemented widely praised regulatory and compliance processes that helped remediate the global insurer, which had been taken over by the U.S. government after the economic crash of 2008. Yet despite earning such accolades, the decidedly modest Folsom attributes her successes to her multinational team of regulatory/compliance professionals at AIG, where she established a global compliance program responsible for monitoring the company's business operations in more than 130 countries.