Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everyone. You've got questions and we've got answers. Welcome to another Bella Asks episode of the Ethicast.
Here at Ethisphere, we believe there is no competition in compliance. That's why we're using this show as a platform to answer high level questions about business integrity that have been posed to us by the members of the Business Ethics Ethics Leadership alliance, or bela.
Bella is a global ethics and compliance community that provides exclusive access to helpful data, benchmarking events and other resources to advance your ENC program. It also provides a concierge service by which members can submit questions around best practices and our internal experts will provide an answer plus helpful resources with more information.
Many of these questions are particular to a specific company's needs, but many more of them speak to challenges or opportunities that facing ENT professionals everywhere. So in this episode we're going to answer one such question as part of our ongoing mission to make the world a better place by advancing business integrity.
And joining us once again to lend her insights on these questions is Bella chair Erica Salmon. Vern. Erica, as always, it's a wonder to have you back on the program. Thank you so much for joining us.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Oh, Bill, it's 100% my pleasure. This is a great question today, so I'm happy to be here.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: It really is. This is an anti competition question and it reads, how should I monitor industry gatherings with the potential for interacting with competitors?
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Yep.
And Bill, part of the reason why I wanted to do this one was it aligns with another Bella asks question that we got in that I actually spent about a half hour on the phone with the Bella member discussing, which was related to how they could think about tweaking their existing clearance process for industry gatherings to clean out some of the noise. So when I saw this question come in, I thought it was really wonderful opportunity to kind of give a bit of an answer to both all at once, if we could.
So the place you have to start with, as always, is your risk.
What is risky about having industry peers at trade shows?
What kinds of trade gatherings might lend themselves to that particular risk? And by that I mean is your potential antitrust risk collusion? So, you know, dividing markets, setting prices, is your particular antitrust risk. Blackballing suppliers, is your particular antitrust risk. Trying to hire each other's employees is your particular antitrust risk algorithmic collusion, which was a term that you and I absolutely were not using five years ago, but is very much in the vernacular now, as some of the various computer modeling systems make company coordination or Coordination with competitors easier than ever because we have these software pieces that are giving us information about the market. And if everybody's using the same information about the market, guess what happens? All of a sudden your prices start to look very similar. So there's a variety of different ways of thinking about the risks.
And unfortunately, I can't answer for you what your particular risk profile is. You, you have to think about what is my organization, what industry are we in, what level of market control do we already have? Are we on the verge of potentially being seen as a monopolist? Are we potentially going to be accused of maintaining our monopoly? Right. There's all these different factors that go into that piece of analysis and you have to do that with your team. But that is going to be the starting place. You start with, what do my risks look like? How do I think about anti competition law risk?
What are the pieces of risk that I am presented with?
Once you have those, then you think about, okay, what would a trade show or an industry gathering look like that would potentially trigger one of these risks?
The larger the gathering, the more people who are there.
Is there potential for peer to peer conversations? Is there potential for closed door conversations?
Is there, are there obvious places on this agenda where there's going to be a lot of alcohol involved and perhaps people are going to make bad choices? Right? Like there's lots and lots of different ways that you can potentially gauge the riskiness of a particular action.
And then, and this is the piece that I talked to this particular Bella member about when we were on the phone last week.
Then you have to think about how well have I prepared my people to speak spot these risks?
Because part of how you get noise in your disclosure process is you get your employees scared enough that they're doing CYA disclosure, so they're disclosing just in case there's a risk. And then all of a sudden you find your compliance team is just inundated with things where it's like, no, of course you can go to, you know, that gathering that has zero possibility of having, you know, people, people at the, at the, at the event that you could potentially engage with or, you know, maybe there's some potential in there for these are the things you have to think about or. Oh my gosh, absolutely. That is a hugely high risk organization or entity. So you really have to, you have to think about how you have educated your highest risk employees to make sure that they are helping you risk spot so that you can get out in front of these issues. So a lot of words I just said. There's bottom line is think about what your antitrust or anti competition law or competition law rather risk actually looks like, right? What are the things that you need to be worried about for your particular organization at this moment in time? And that's also important because we have seen too many companies get in trouble over the years because they did a risk assessment on a particular for a particular part of the business five, six years ago. They haven't updated it. And we all know that business moves fast. And so you may be in a very different place today than you were five years ago. You might be in markets you weren't in. You might have a market position, you know, position of market dominance in a particular sector you didn't have before. So risk assessment, refreshed risk assessment. Who are your risk people? How are you trained them and then how are you going to monitor these ongoing pieces?
So those are the questions to really be asking yourself when you are tackling this as a risk area.
Yeah.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Fantastic. I couldn't agree more. Risk assessments age like milk, not wine. So I really love that they should be refreshed on a regular basis.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: So it's a great point.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: Indeed. Well, a great answer to a great question. Erica, thank you once again for lending your brain power to Bella Asks.
[00:06:36] Speaker B: Oh, Bill, it's 100% my pleasure. To all those Bell members out there. As I say at the end of every episode, keep the questions coming, okay? Because Bill and I like nothing more than coming back to answer them.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: To learn more about Bella, visit ethisphere.com bella to request guest access to the member resource hub and to speak with the Bella Engagement Director. If you have a question that you would like answered on this program, contact the Bella Concierge service and we'll get to work on it for you right away.
This has been another Bella Asks episode of the Ethicast. Thank you so much for joining us. We hope you've enjoyed the show. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
And be sure to tell a colleague about us as well. Every like comment and share really helps this program. That's all for now, but until next time, remember, strong ethics is good business.
