Stakeholders and Compliance, no greys.

It is clear that business today is risk management, that is, the product and the quality of the product are no longer under discussion. Nobody goes for a coffee and thinks that Starbucks coffee or the coffee from the other coffee shop that competes with Starbucks is good or bad; they are all good, otherwise you don't go there. So the whole problem is how to differentiate your product from that of the competition. And today, stakeholders, who are the customers and the community that is linked to your business, are choosing based on other variables, which are the so-called hidden risks. In energy, as you rightly say, it is easy to find them, because they have been sought for 100 years, because they have an explosion effect, a hole, contamination.

In the case of other industries that might not be so easy, they are easy. What you don't have to do is what many companies and businessmen do, that is, the ostrich, they hide those risks they can't handle, they think they don't exist. Clearly, what we have to do is to be absolutely realistic, and that is why Compliance has to be at the small table, because the great virtue of Compliance is that for Compliance there are no greys. Compliance will tell you whether something is black or white. 

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You can't be a little bit honest, or quite honest. Compliance brings the binary to the table. In this respect, I always have a difference with my original profession as a lawyer, because we lawyers are the ones who look for greys, and that is the worst thing there is for Compliance, which does not need greys. Compliance has to tell you: look, up to here it's white, five centimetres ahead, which is where you want to be, it's black. So, either you take a step back and return to white, or what you want to do is black, so it can't be done. Either you have to do it differently or you have to change it, but the way you want to do it is illegal, for example, or it is an act punishable by antitrust law, or it is an act that damages the environment, etc.

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So, fundamentally, what you have to have is the possibility of direct communication with the makers of the business, the product and the service, so that this does not go too far, and you can show that you are in control of the risks, of all the risks. Because in the end, selling your product will allow you to tell your stakeholders, for example, in the case of Starbucks, that you pay reasonable salaries to your coffee suppliers and that you pay attention to the health of the coffee plantations and that you make sure that they do not harm the environment in the way they irrigate the coffee plantations.

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That's why they charge 6 dollars for a cup of coffee, when all their lives it was worth 0.50 dollars. So that $5.50 premium for every cup of coffee you take away has to be underpinned by the new forms of proof of your quality, which is basically the way to meet and demonstrate your full compliance. This seems fundamental.