This Guest Column is one in a series of first-hand accounts written by senior executives at U.S. public companies. The goal of the column is to provide “lessons learned” during the implementation of various governance and compliance programs. To be considered as the author of a future column, public company executives should email the editor of Compliance Week. Only public company executives will be considered; partners at law firms or accounting firms, or executives at companies that market products or services to the compliance/governance markets, will not be considered.
At Abbott, integrity and quality have always been essential. We continually seek to improve our programs, learning from the difficult issues we have encountered as well as from our best practices benchmarking and assessments. In this column for Compliance Week, I look to share some of the experiences we’ve had in building our current ethics and compliance function at Abbott. I will briefly describe how our program developed, focusing on two key areas in this column: infrastructure and effectiveness. Then I will touch on some key lessons learned so far, as we continue to work on learning how to do it better.
