Yes, And by Kelly Leonard & Tom Yorton

Author:Kelly Leonard & Tom Yorton [Leonard, Kelly & Yorton, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062248558
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

WHO PUT MY ETHICS IN YOUR COMPLIANCE?

OK, we know what some of you are saying right now: “Yeah, all that comedy theory is great for you Second City schmucks, but it would never work in my company. We’re more conservative than the Tea Party, and our boss would never let us laugh openly at real problems.”

Well, make yourselves cozy, friends, this part of the chapter is just for you. We wrote a little song with you in mind, and it goes like this . . .

Actually, we don’t know how to write songs, but we are über confident on this topic. We’ve faced your skepticism a thousand times, and while it’s legit to be concerned about how something will play inside your company, we know from experience that when you need to convey an important message, there’s not a company or topic that can’t benefit from the thoughtful use of comedy. And we’ll go further: the more critical the message, the more you actually need comedy to cut through the clutter, grab attention, and make the issue safe to talk about. Counterintuitively, the higher the stakes, the more you need to create space for honest conversation, and few things do that better than comedy.

Still not sure? What if we told you that we’ve quickly but stealthily revolutionized the field of corporate ethics and compliance training over the past three years by bringing comedy to the thorniest, dullest, get-it-wrong-and-you-might-go-to-jail topics? We’ve done just that, and with all due respect to our partners in compliance, this was a field that was in desperate need of change. For those of you who’ve ever had the misfortune of slaving through an e-learning course on insider trading or the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, you know how boring—and sometimes insulting to your intelligence—this content can be, with mind-numbing training, offensive role plays, and a “check-the-box” approach that rarely drives positive behavior change, but does usually breed cynicism among the poor souls who have to endure the annual code of conduct certification.

Of all our work with corporate clients, ethics and compliance training has to be the biggest comedic dead zone. Traditionally, that’s where funny goes to die. Even by the somewhat soft standards of corporate comedy, this stuff is brutal. That’s why we took it on, and shockingly enough, it’s become a huge hit for our business. The quick and dirty story is that after the financial crisis of 2007, Second City Works was looking for some recession-proof lines of business, since our staple activities in corporate entertainment, training, and marketing were in the tank. Then we got a couple of assignments to make engaging videos promoting a company’s ethics hotline or code of conduct, and in digging into it, it occurred to us that here was a good business opportunity. Big companies are obligated to do this training, and the products in the market were almost universally despised. So we developed a library of video content called RealBiz Shorts: “shorts” as in short funny videos, and “real” in the sense that we were calling out the lameness of most existing compliance training.

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