The Violin Theorem

Nothing lasts forever. Not even cold November rain.

Honestly Lay Bare is an expert practitioner in the fine and under appreciated art of hotel room dancing.

What is that you ask and how in the world can the art of something that sounds very suspect (it isn't!) have anything to do with the proper and consistent execution of internal controls, risk management or corporate governance.

Firstly what is hotel room dancing?

For those of us that travel for our work we have four exercise choices - firstly to not do any; secondly to exercise in the hotel's gym; thirdly to go for a run / walk outside or lastly to exercise in one's room.

And this is where hotel room dancing comes into play.

One needs only an iPod; some daggy clothes (note for anyone so thinking - the business class pjs given by the airlines are on the border of appropriate attire even for hotel room dancing!) and a bed to jump on at appropriate times throughout one's hotel room dancing routine.

The aim of what is known in the trade as a HRDS - as in hotel room dancing session (apologies to those readers that were already aware of that abbreviation) is to pick the precise songs that one can do intense jumping; dancing; air guitar; air drums; and mosh pit diving.

Therein lies the need for a comfy bed to jump on ... one needs to make sure that the bed will take the full force of a grown man or woman jumping onto it from a distance of at least two feet away!

A HRDS usually lasts about 10 minutes after which time you can rest easy in the knowledge that you have done your exercise for the day ... and if you haven't closed the curtains ... you have kindly given the office workers in the next tower a story to tell for many years to come!

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Now every HRD (as in Hotel Room Dancer)'s iPod selection will be different - for some it will be classical music; for others country.

For Honestly Lay Bare it is anything that ... for a reason that Honestly Lay Bare cannot really explain ... has a violin (or violin sounding) section somewhere embedded into the song.

(For the record, Honestly Lay Bare has one exception to this - being U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" which is surely one of the great introductions to a song in the history of rock).

Honestly Lay Bare isnt dancing to the tune that Ludwig van Beethoven knocked out in 1806 ... the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major, Opus 61.

For Honestly Lay Bare it is more likely to be November Rain by Gun's and Roses past God Only Knows by the Beach Boys; up against ColdPlay's Viva la Vida through to Beautiful by James Blunt (yes - Honestly Lay Bare has wide tastes!).

And as much as Honestly Lay Bare knows that the readership is interested in its musical tastes that - surprisingly - is not the focus of this update.

Rather it is an examination of why it is that certain environments (or in the instance of HRD - certain songs) produce a reaction in the reviewer (or the listener) that are consistently positive.

So translatting that to internal controls - one needs to look for a particular piece of the controls jigsaw that you consider is present in every efficient and effective internal control environment.

What is your internal controls violin and how do you identify it?

Perhaps more importantly how do you know when there is an internal control environment that has its "violin" but is neither an efficient or effective environment in managing an organisation's risks.

Honestly Lay Bare knows intuitively that there are songs with violin sections that cannot be particularly good and definitely are not suitable to hotel room dancing. For some reason we are deaf to these songs and their presence doesn't negate - in our mind at least - the fact that all good songs have a violin section.

The challenge therefore in what Honestly Lay Bare will christen the Violin Theorem of internal controls is to be sufficiently self aware to be able to sort the good from the bad.