Good news for compliance professionals who have an addiction to anti-bribery guidance: two of the more notable names in the field have just provided a fresh fix. 

Tom Fox and Jon Rydberg, both ex-compliance officers who subsequently became independent consultants on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, have just published Global Anti-Bribery Leadership: Practical FCPA and Bribery Act Compliance Concepts. You can buy both hard copy and Kindle editions at Amazon.com for $12.99 or $4.99, respectively. If you don't yet know who these two are, Fox writes extensively about anti-bribery issues at the FCPA Ethics & Compliance Blog; Rydberg is head of Orchid Advisers and is the former head of compliance for Smith & Wesson.

The book is an easy 60 pages—you could read it in one sitting, if so inclined—and geared specifically for CEOs, board directors, and other corporate leaders who have an interest in strong, ethical cultures, but aren't immersed in the day-to-day business of compliance programs. The prose isn't Shakespeare, but then, it's not intended to be; it's aimed at the cranky, overworked senior executive who needs a crash course on FCPA requirements as he flies into a board meeting he hasn't prepared for. You'll see lots of key words underlined, key sentences bold-faced, and plain language throughout.

To my thinking, one of the most important chapters in the book is Chapter 3, How Do Such Laws Relate to Your Business? Compliance professionals sometimes get a bit lost, talking in abstractions about what an effective compliance program looks like—which is usually when executives in sales, procurement, or IT smile and nod at you, while privately wondering, “So what am I supposed to do for this guy?” Fox and Rydberg do a good job knocking down that confusion, telling the reader to ask himself: What do you actually sell? How do you sell it? How do you deliver your product? Those are concrete questions any intelligent executive can answer, and then start to understand what those answers mean for his FCPA risk.

Ditto for Chapter 7, Leveraging Internal Controls to Mitigate Risk. Let's be honest: internal controls are another subject where most non-compliance executives will nod politely, but not fully understand what you mean or what you want them to do. Fox and Rydberg don't give too many specific examples of effective FCPA controls (that's not easy; most examples are either so general they're meaningless, or so specific they're not relevant). They do, however, give a plainspoken, logical argument about what internal controls do and why they're important. That may be obvious to you the CCO, but this book is intended for the non-compliance professional. For that audience, who will wriggle away from internal controls any chance they can, this chapter is mighty helpful.

All in all, Global Anti-Bribery Leadership is a useful book at a low price, digestible by a wide range of business executives out there. If you need some relatively pain-free FCPA guidance to staple to your board's forehead, try this one.

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