All you compliance executives stuck working on this Tuesday before the July 4 holiday, we’ve decided here to reward your dedication. Compliance Week has a dozen spare copies of Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World, by Sam Sommers, a fascinating study into how people lull themselves into decision-making processes that might be, shall we say, less than sound. We’re giving them away free of charge to the first dozen Compliance Week subscribers who ask for one.
Sommers spoke at the Compliance Week 2012 annual conference, giving a (hugely popular) presentation on the internal biases humans use all the time to make decisions. Situations Matter (Riverhead Books, 2011, $25.95) is the book-length treatment of all the points he raised then: that people follow all sorts of subtle contextual clues when making decisions, and can behave very differently in practice than we all believe we’d behave in theory. The 304 pages are an easy read, and well worth the time for compliance officers grappling with that eternal question for our field, “Why do my employees keep doing dumb things?”
