AMC wraps up Breaking Bad on Sunday—the critically acclaimed series about Walter White (aka, Heisenberg), a high school chemistry teacher turned meth czar. Ahead of the series finale, we’ve cooked a batch of five takeaways for compliance professionals waiting for Heisenberg’s last move. (Note: serious series spoilers below!)
1. Understand Your Business
On Breaking Bad, one of Heisenberg’s downfalls was his mathematical approach to a business built on violence and greed (did he really think that the Neo-Nazis who took over his drug business would let Hank live?). A big challenge for compliance officers is to understand the nature of their organization. Every successful business does something well—and typically, there is a compliance risk associated with the company’s success. For a manufacturing or oil-refining company, it may be health and safety of the employees; for a retail company, it could be product or food safety; a logistics company faces trade control risks; hospitals must address patient privacy. And so on.
These risks are core to the company’s business, so compliance professionals have to understand and address the compliance risk to ensure that the business is successful. For example, your company may need a robust health-and-safety program with key components that address leadership, training, communication, risk assessment, policies and procedures, and audits. The compliance professional may be able to borrow from the safety department some of their methods that are already familiar (and accepted) within the organization. But compliance procedures simply cut and pasted from another company just may not fit with a risk-based approach and your company’s culture. A key task for compliance officers is to understand the business and integrate compliance into what the business does well.
2. Don’t Call Saul
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