Revising Your Code of Conduct Don't Wait for Another Great Fire of London

In 1666 the dates of September 4 and 5 are generally recognized as the worst days of the Great Fire of London. The Great Fire started at the bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane, shortly after midnight on Sunday, 2 September, and spread rapidly west across the City of London. The fire gutted the medieval City of London inside the old Roman City Walls. It is estimated to have destroyed the homes of 70,000 of the City’s 80,000 inhabitants. The City was rebuilt, with much of the old street plan being recreated in the new City, with improvements in hygiene and fire safety: wider streets, open and accessible wharves along the length of the Thames, with no houses obstructing access to the river, and, most importantly, buildings constructed of brick and stone, not wood. New public buildings were created on their predecessors’ sites; the most famous is St. Paul’s Cathedral and its smaller cousins, Christopher Wren’s 50 new churches.

Not all rebuilding requires such drastic destruction however. In a recent article in the Society for Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) Magazine, entitled, “Six steps for revising your company’s Code of Conduct” authors Anne Marie Logarta and Ruth Ward suggest considering the following issues before you take on an update of your Code of Conduct.