Last week, I attended the Global Ethics Summit in New York, and the opening keynote address was by Alex Dimitrief, general counsel of GE. Dimitrief was quick to note that GE had placed itself on the Most Ethical Companies list for 10 years in a row and that the company’s culture of compliance has a lot to do with it.
He noted that GE makes a significant investment in compliance, both by creating compliance programs for each of GE’s many satellite operations, but also by creating a centralized compliance function that ties them all together so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With a company like GE, there are a lot of parts—more than 300,000 employees in 165 different countries—so Dimitrief’s job is hardly an easy one.
