4 ms·

What about Chief Compliance Officer or Chief Risk Officer? (Granted, not an awesome moment to be arguing that those are effective...) Or Chief Security Officer?

by jcheng 4y ago

bigtunacan 4y ago
These roles are often more effective as they are often given direct oversight, review and acceptance/rejection powers that allow them to behave as a gatekeeper; often times as a partner with legal departments.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Excellent point actually, I think those examples made me adjust my opinion a bit. Chief Security Officer I don't really agree is analogous, because while all teams are responsible for security, there is enough "independent security work" (e.g. managing infrastructure and IT security) to warrant their own teams. But I think Chief Compliance Officer and Chief Risk Officer are pretty analogous - their main directive is to ensure other teams adjust their behaviors to follow the rules. I think the difference, though, is that these roles have unambiguous, and in many cases legally defined, requirements. I actually think it is the right moment to argue those are effective - SVB famously went without a Chief Risk Officer for a year despite having an unusually high number of risk committee meetings. We've all seen what happens when companies don't take risk and compliance seriously. With things that are "fuzzier" (and by "fuzzier" I mean real but ill-defined/hard to measure impacts on the business of making money) it's just too difficult to have impact on teams you don't own. A Chief Risk Officer can easily make the case "If you don't do what I say, our company will fail - like, completely cease to exist in 2 days." I don't think a Chief Diversity Officer has the luxury of that sense of immediacy. In any case, thanks for helping me think about this a little more broadly.
- lr4444lr 4y ago
  I think you should bite the bullet on this one: those officers he describes are excellent resources for the heads of other departments with the accountability to use as a resource, but they aren't unilaterally setting policy for the entire org., nor dictating specific rules to the rank and file. A Chief Diversity Officer could be useful in a similar capacity, e.g. a CFO decides that the company's charitable contributions should better reflect modern sensibilities, or when a head of HR wants to know how to recruit a more diverse pool, or when a CMO wants to brand-target better. But the Chief Diversity Officer isn't running his own parallel competing initiatives.
nirav72 4y ago
Compliance officers still have some value in terms of providing cover for regulatory agencies. As in 'we did our due diligence..see even our compliance guy signed off on it'. But ethicist at some company - I've always wondered what they do all day.

What about Chief Compliance Officer or Chief Risk Officer? (Granted, not an awesome moment to be arguing that those are effective...) Or Chief Security Officer?

by jcheng 4y ago

What about Chief Compliance Officer or Chief Risk Officer? (Granted, not an awesome moment to be arguing that those are effective...) Or Chief Security Officer?

bigtunacan 4y ago

These roles are often more effective as they are often given direct oversight, review and acceptance/rejection powers that allow them to behave as a gatekeeper; often times as a partner with legal departments.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

Excellent point actually, I think those examples made me adjust my opinion a bit. Chief Security Officer I don't really agree is analogous, because while all teams are responsible for security, there is enough "independent security work" (e.g. managing infrastructure and IT security) to warrant their own teams. But I think Chief Compliance Officer and Chief Risk Officer are pretty analogous - their main directive is to ensure other teams adjust their behaviors to follow the rules. I think the difference, though, is that these roles have unambiguous, and in many cases legally defined, requirements. I actually think it is the right moment to argue those are effective - SVB famously went without a Chief Risk Officer for a year despite having an unusually high number of risk committee meetings. We've all seen what happens when companies don't take risk and compliance seriously. With things that are "fuzzier" (and by "fuzzier" I mean real but ill-defined/hard to measure impacts on the business of making money) it's just too difficult to have impact on teams you don't own. A Chief Risk Officer can easily make the case "If you don't do what I say, our company will fail - like, completely cease to exist in 2 days." I don't think a Chief Diversity Officer has the luxury of that sense of immediacy. In any case, thanks for helping me think about this a little more broadly.

lr4444lr 4y ago
I think you should bite the bullet on this one: those officers he describes are excellent resources for the heads of other departments with the accountability to use as a resource, but they aren't unilaterally setting policy for the entire org., nor dictating specific rules to the rank and file. A Chief Diversity Officer could be useful in a similar capacity, e.g. a CFO decides that the company's charitable contributions should better reflect modern sensibilities, or when a head of HR wants to know how to recruit a more diverse pool, or when a CMO wants to brand-target better. But the Chief Diversity Officer isn't running his own parallel competing initiatives.

nirav72 4y ago

Compliance officers still have some value in terms of providing cover for regulatory agencies. As in 'we did our due diligence..see even our compliance guy signed off on it'. But ethicist at some company - I've always wondered what they do all day.