Business Insights · Updated October 2026
This is where I publish short explanations of the models behind compliance and quality work, with the sources shown. Each takes about a minute to read. Each uses a real company case and ends with a question for your own organisation. So far there are forty, twenty from each of two books.
I have given each book a page of its own. The posts stay together that way, and new ones go in the same place.
Compliance and risk · 20 posts
Here you will find the Three Lines Model, COSO, ISO 31000 and the Risk Appetite Framework. You will also find bowtie analysis, the Fraud Triangle, Just Culture and conduct risk. I have put each one next to the corporate case that shows why it exists. HSBC and WorldCom are in there, with Wells Fargo and the banks that sold PPI.
Read the 20 posts →
Quality assurance · 20 posts
Here you will find PDCA, Deming’s 14 Points and the Juran Trilogy. ISO 9001, EFQM, Baldrige, CMMI and Six Sigma are here too. Each is told through a company that used it well, or one that paid for ignoring it. Toyota, Ford, Boeing and Cadbury all appear.
Read the 20 posts →If you are short of time, these are the six I would read first. Three deal with control and risk. The other three deal with quality.
Key Compliance Models
Three teams were watching the risk. All three had gone slack at the same time. That is the HSBC story in one line.
Key Quality Models
Say what you do. Do what you say. Show the evidence. Put right what goes wrong, so it stays put right.
Key Compliance Models
RBS confused capacity with appetite. Which is another way of saying it was willing to bet its own existence.
Key Quality Models
Most people change how they work and never check if it helped. They just move on. Next month, the same problem is back.
Key Compliance Models
Miss the numbers, and you were coached, then written up, then gone. So staff made the numbers.
Key Quality Models
Terminal 5, March 2008. Every single part had been built well. What failed was the way the parts joined up.
Governance, risk, control and conduct.
Improvement methods, standards and excellence frameworks.
Why I publish these
Many of the cases in these posts have one thing in common. The firm had heard of the right model, and often had it written into a policy. What nobody had done was ask the awkward question it was written to raise. That is why every post ends with that question. If your honest answer worries you, start there. It is also the sort of gap a Diagnostic is built to find.
The books have the longer versions, with every model and every case. In advisory work on compliance management and quality assurance I apply the same models to one organisation at a time.
It is the part of this site where I publish short explanations of the models that compliance and quality work rests on. One post covers one model. Each uses a real company case and takes about a minute to read. I have grouped the posts by the book they come from.
I do. They are taken from two of my books, Key Compliance Models and Key Quality Models. Each one was checked against published sources before it went up.
In October 2026 the figures, and the statements about named companies, were checked against published sources. Documents from regulators, courts, inquiries and standards bodies were used wherever they existed. Some figures turned out to be out of date or not quite right, and those posts were corrected. The sources are listed under each one.
Each book has its own page, and I add new posts to those pages from time to time. Look at the date at the top of a page to see when it last changed.
These posts reflect my own analysis, with sources shown. They are general explanation and not advice on your situation.
