TED and TEDx conferences and events have become important and popular venues for speakers from all walks of life.  This includes academics and business leaders but also ordinary people who have had inspiring or extraordinary experiences, to share their insights and stories. Given how ever-present ethics and morality are in business and life, many talks touch on useful compliance topics.

• Creating Ethical Cultures in Business (Brooke Deterline) – We must question why we don’t speak up on behalf of other people or ideals, and how it makes us feel after we encounter a situation where we want to say something but don’t. Challenging discomfort and fear can help us advocate for each other and our principles and create corporate cultures where standing up courageously and speaking our values is seen as safe and helpful. Courage is an inspiring and powerful antidote to corruption and unethical behavior.

• Building Business on Character Ethic (Kevin Byrne) – Commercial profitability and competitive advantage dominate most metrics of business success, but how can these be achieved and sustained without integrity? Taking care to do the right thing in all areas of business – from dealing with customers to retaining employees and everywhere in between – and avoid reputational risk are powerful drivers in building a business designed to last.

• Why Credibility is the Foundation of Leadership (Barry Posner) – Speaking to the perennial compliance topic of tone at the top, leaders must be people worth believing and following. We evaluate whether those in senior management or supervisory positions are competent and credible. Expertise, intelligence, passion, and innovative thinking – all of these things are also necessary for leadership to succeed, but in order for anyone to believe in them, integrity must come first.

• We Need a “Moral Operating System” (Damon Horowitz) – A strong, developed moral framework is necessary for knowing what to do with all the information and power we possess and must make decisions about how to use on a regular basis in both business and life in general. Ethical decision-making is challenging and nuanced and can even be awkward. Thinking, discussing, debating, and defining beliefs are all integral to understand our human ability to distinguish right from wrong and make a principled choice on how to act.

• Our Buggy Moral Code (Dan Ariely) – Confronting the theory that purely bad people are to blame for the majority of bad things that happen in society, the work of behavioral economists such as Dan Ariely suggests that human behavior is far more complex than static good or bad values. Rather, wrongdoing in decision-making is influenced greatly by intuition and context. Situational awareness and a strong affinity for personal morality are therefore important mitigating factors to unethical behavior.

This is merely a brief selection of TED/TEDx talks touching upon personal empowerment, entrepreneurship, leadership, decision-making, and behavioral economics – all topics which are linked powerfully to compliance and organizational ethics.