March 2017
It is a truism that negative news tends to generate more attention, and of late there has been too much of it directed at internal audit. I wouldn’t go so far as to characterize it all as “fake news,” but much of it is “hyped news” at best. Whether it’s a media headline trumpeting a purported decline in stakeholder confidence in internal audit or pundits characterizing the profession in such stark terms as the next Blackberry, a few sensational “sound bites” can easily become fodder for those who are quick to relegate the profession to irrelevancy.
Naysayers about internal audit are nothing new.…
When everyone shouts, no one listens. That truism is more relevant today than ever. From politics to social media, the prevailing approach to discourse is to shout down or vilify those who disagree. It seems the art of persuasion has fallen out of favor. But internal auditors cannot allow themselves to be caught up in the fervor of de rigueur intransigence.
In order to effect positive change in organizations, we must make those on the receiving end of our recommendations and reports more open, comfortable, and amenable to what we have to say. Internal auditors must embrace the art of persuasion.…
Uber, the ride-sharing service that has been the darling of the upstart business world, recently suffered through a brutal series of reputational hits. By any standard, the list of miscues was a public relations nightmare: allegations of sexual harassment from a former engineer; firing of a new vice president for similar allegations at his former place of employment; a lawsuit alleging theft of driverless car technology; and an embarrassing video surfacing of Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick berating — get this — an Uber driver.
Did I mention a second vice president resigned just as questions of the company’s culture and business practices were being raised?…
When everyone shouts, no one listens. That truism is more relevant today than ever. From politics to social media, the prevailing approach to discourse is to shout down or vilify those who disagree. It seems the art of persuasion has fallen out of favor. But internal auditors cannot allow themselves to be caught up in the fervor of de rigueur intransigence.
In order to effect positive change in organizations, we must make those on the receiving end of our recommendations and reports more open, comfortable, and amenable to what we have to say. Internal auditors must embrace the art of persuasion.…
Like many chief audit executives, when I was leading an internal audit function, I periodically found management and the board questioning whether internal audit’s resources should be reduced. Whenever that happened, I used the occasion as a call to action to do two things: (1) redouble my efforts to communicate the value we bring to the organization, and (2) examine the efficiency and effectiveness of the internal audit operation itself.
The second initiative was important, because if reductions in resources were levied, I needed to mitigate the impact on the value we delivered by ensuring we were as efficient as we would expect to find other operating units in the organization.…