Learning From The Crown

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queen-elizabethturteltaub-adam-200x200-150x150By Adam Turteltaub
adam.turteltaub@corporatecompliance.org

I just finished the first season of The Crown, a new series on Netflix.  The show focuses on the events leading up to and the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

As a piece of television, it’s extraordinary.  It is fascinating story telling that turns the royal family from people we know of, to people we feel we know well.  And it’s incredibly lavish, filled with all the pomp and majesty that surrounds Her Royal Majesty.

Throughout the series there is a key storyline that insinuates itself into all the others:  every monarch knows that he or she could very well be the last, and the best way to prevent that from happening is to focus not on one’s self, or even one’s family, but the crown – the monarchy – itself.

Put another way, no king or queen, no prince or princess, can be more important than the institution of the monarchy.

It’s often a hard reality to live in, as the show portrays.  Love lives, personal interest and passions, and even the most mundane of decisions are colored by the issue.  But remarkably it’s what all of us in compliance already know:  no individual can be more important than the organization he or she serves.

The problem is business loses track of this too often.  A star salesperson is viewed as critical to the company’s success.  A CEO seems to be everything to the organization.

But, what makes for good employees at any level truly valuable is that they help build an organization that is greater than they are.

The mistake comes when there is the belief that someone is so important that the rules don’t apply, or excuses can be made.

That needs to stop.  Because just as one bad king or queen can threaten the monarchy, one bad actor can threaten the entire enterprise, and the sooner any organization and its employees realize that the future of the institution is more important than any one individual, the better off it will be.

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1 COMMENT

  1. Adam, I could not agree more. The scenes in which she dresses down PM Churchill and a Lord in her cabinet for their breach of trust in keeping a critical fact from her was text-book disclosure motivation. We should be seeing it in slides at compliance conferences. Despite our best intentions, we cannot expect to stay in compliance if we do not create a culture in which reporting of critical facts are not only expected, required and demanded, but also made safe.

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