It was 2002, and the U.S. business landscape was being rocked by a wave of corporate ethics and accounting scandals.

At the time, Syrus Global's founder, Ms. Alice Peterson, was serving as the Audit Committee Chairman of a public company. Against the backdrop of these growing scandals, Ms. Peterson asked management to identify the best external services for eliciting important information anonymously from internal sources. She and the rest of the board were interested in uncovering the types of tips so many employees, managers, and executives are uncomfortable divulging through normal channels.

The report management provided to the Board told a sad story. None of the so-called "hotline" services available at the time had highly trained, credentialed people answering the phones. Would a well-educated middle or senior management employee be willing to deal with a high school graduate reading a script on a screen? Would submitters stay on the line for long hold periods?

None of these "legacy" hotline services offered a disciplined method of tracking and following up to make sure the information was appropriately acted upon. How could a board of directors be confident it was protecting shareholders' interests with no structured processes it could oversee, and no actions it could verify?

Sorely disappointed to find no robust and secure service for receiving, accessing, tracking and managing confidential communication, Ms. Peterson began exploring the opportunity to design best practices to pull important information up and into the hands of people who could and would act on it. Based on the early facts and her passionate belief that enterprises would be made stronger and more resilient with a high-quality ethics reporting and helpline service, Ms. Peterson founded Listen Up in the fall of 2002. The company was renamed Syrus Global in 2005 to reflect its growing service offering.

Through research, the Syrus team found that while many companies said they had a culture of open and honest dialog, and many even practiced it, surveys showed that employees at all levels and in all types of organizations frequently held back knowledge of wrongdoing. They also learned that in the vast majority of circumstances, employees wanted to report bad behavior because they wanted to do the right thing. However, the research showed that they would only divulge important information if they could be made to feel truly safe in doing so.

Indeed, many employees feared repercussions from coworkers if it was revealed that they had pointed out others' wrongdoing. Nobody wanted to be ostracized or discriminated against after being labeled a "snitch".

The leadership team felt strongly that even the best model in the world for eliciting and receiving tips and complaints would be fairly useless with no tracking and follow up processes attached. At the same time, they understood general counsels' perspectives on the need for tight information control.

Meanwhile, directors all over the world were suddenly sitting up straighter and taking their responsibilities much more seriously. They sharpened their understanding of the need for getting the bad news out early, and facing it headlong before it festered into something disastrous. CEO's and CFO's were more wide-eyed as they began to certify financials, appreciating any tools that empowered them to assert that their knowledge and controls were indeed strong.

In response to this need, Ms. Peterson and her team set about envisioning, planning and executing an end-to-end solution dedicated to both capturing the best information and swiftly delivering it to the appropriate review personnel. The team wanted to create a system that would not allow cronyism, even in its most benign form, to get in the way of addressing sensitive internal issues.

"Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm."
Publilius Syrus
100 B.C.