I wrote this book to help you become a good investigator. The nature of the investigations business is that the better you become, the higher your company profile will be. But your desire to be a successful investigator presents you with a dilemma: If you are a timid investigator, you are ineffective. But if you are bold, you expose yourself to professional risk.
This book presented “protect your career” as its first part. Just like a police officer’s first obligation is to go home alive at the end of his shift, your first obligation is not to jeopardize your job by becoming collateral damage to an effective compliance program. Despite their respective contributions, your colleagues who write codes of conduct, hang posters in lunchrooms, or pass out cafeteria cake on Compliance Day do not take the risks you must take in order to be successful.
So this book has not been primarily about interviews and documents. This book is more honestly about how you walk the tightrope between professional success and disaster.
This book concludes with some pearls of wisdom that come from my experiences in conducting over 300 workplace investigations. Here are my “Rules for Investigators:”