“You walk over there and you step on the friggin’ snake . . . . Don’t accept that every time something comes up you have to get a whole team of people to discuss it.”

GlaxoSmithKline CEO Jean-Pierre Garnier in his year-end address to employees using the snake metaphor to encourage swift action and less burearcracy.  Reported by The Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2006.

Way to go Jean-Pierre!  But recognizing the legal anaconda in the corporate chandelier requires legal literacy and a willingness to apply it.  Sometimes employees don’t appreciate the legal consequences of their business decisions until it’s too late.  The “joke” goes too far and suddenly turns into a harassment claim.  The favor for a new customer by-passes credit approval and turns into a collection matter.  The rush to market encourages short-cuts that later translate into product liability claims.  Competing incentives often push aside legal considerations in the name of “trade-offs.”

Decisions are only as good as the information they are based on.  If legal consequences are discounted before managers even know what they are the math becomes self-defeating and you wind up trading one snake for a more expensive one.

For tips on how to raise the legal literacy quotient of your organization see Chapter 5 (How to Integrate Legal Literacy into the Value Chain: Who Needs to Know What) of The Business Guide to Legal Literacy: What Every Manager Should Know About the Law.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Business Blind Spots, Costs, Decision Making, Knowledge Management, Leadership, Quote of the Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.