Take the reins in corporate governance: with their unique skills, communicators have a chance to improve compliance efforts.

Enron, WorldCom, Parmalat Group Italy, Robert Maxwell and the U.K.'s Daily Mirror--these are examples where company oversight has proven inadequate, with disastrous results. Corporate governance frameworks, when effective, can help organizations avoid potential compliance violations while promoting prosperity, consumer confidence and public trust. Communicators can help make such frameworks more than an ineffective checklist.

A Deloitte study of 800 North American companies published last year found that well-planned and well-executed corporate governance programs brought about significant business benefits, including enhanced market confidence and reputation management, reduced risk of loss through fraud, improved acquisition integration, better control over management and information systems, standardization of processes and controls, and improved disclosure for stakeholders.

Today, policymakers worldwide are challenged with striking a balance between market forces and regulation and with implementing internationally recognized principles of responsibility, accountability, transparency and fairness. Communicators have a significant contribution to make in this effort, because they know how to change people's attitudes and behaviors to obtain positive internal outcomes, as well as how to manage reputation externally. IABC's Gold Quill Awards case studies and academic publications alike point to the role that communicators can play in effecting change.

Two of the greatest difficulties for business communicators in tackling corporate governance are defining it and then understanding what contribution they can make.

Corporate governance, as a framework created from different historical, political and cultural events, differs from one part of the world to another. Sir Adrian Cadbury, the author of The Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance (also known as the Cadbury Report, a document highly influential in defining U.K., European Community and global corporate governance), uses this definition: "Corporate governance is concerned with holding the balance between economic and social goals and between individual and communal goals. The corporate governance framework is there to encourage the efficient use of resources and equally to require accountability for the stewardship of those resources. The aim is to align as nearly as possible the interests of individuals, corporations and society."

The contribution communicators can make is to get involved in organizationwide, national and international dialogue about how to improve corporate governance while promoting global prosperity and cooperation. An initiative called "Beyond the Myth of Anglo-American Corporate Governance" was launched in June 2005 by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) to promote more consistent, less complex global corporate practices, and to facilitate understanding of different approaches to governance by fostering an appreciation of equivalent systems.

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For more about compliance issues, including the ICAEW's and other governance models, visit www.iobc.com/cw.