“Caring for everyone’s interest is caring for your own reward” Today I would like to talk about “conflict of interest. But first let me show you a picture before I progress with my speech, as you can see in this picture, the wolf is playing a role of shepherd which is totally a case of conflict of interest because wolf eats animals. Well, everyone has interest in their daily life and this could be a hobby, sports or an investment and not necessarily does this create a conflict of interest situation. It will only happen when your interest competes with the fairness of your advice or services that you give to your client, customers or any person. The truth is that “when you place your trust in somebody you expect them to have your best interest in their mind and if you find that they have not given you the best advice, then the conflict of interest can collapse trust or confidence forever. Let me share some personal experience how the conflict of interest works in our daily life. I am patient of hypocholesterolemia for a long time, I was in the hospital for my routine checkup, and the specialist of cardiology department was very excited to see me, "Asim, I have a fantastic new treatment for you." I was very excited. I walked with him to his office. And he explained to me that, we have a new medicine which will lift your good cholesterol and kill the LDL a bad cholesterol. During discussion, I found that the medicine has adverse reaction on liver, I asked him "this is high potency medicine, what would happen with my liver," "Oh, don't worry about it," he said. "We have one more medicine for your liver; and that would make your liver healthy, but I was still concerned, and I decided not to have this treatment. I went to his assistant and asked her, "What is going on? Why he is trying to change the prescription, and she explained that they have done this procedure on two patients already, and they need the third patient to confirm the authenticity of this medicine. That was my last visit to him. Let me give you a different perspective on the same story. A few month ago, my boss called me and asked to make a report comparing new machines performance vs old machines. And when we run such experiments, we usually hope that one group will behave differently than another. So we had one group that I hoped their performance would be very high, another group that I thought their performance would be very low, and when I got the results, that's what we got -- I was very happy -- aside from one machine. There was one machine in the group that was supposed to have very high performance that was actually performing terribly. And this machine pulled the whole mean down, destroying my statistical analysis. So I looked carefully at this machine. Oh that machine, we all know that there are some technical problems with this machine. "Fantastic!" I thought. "Let's throw this out. Who would include such machine in this report?" and I rerun the report. The purpose of sharing these stories was to bring two important point to the foreground. The first one is that in life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces. They just have the incentives that get them to be blinded to reality and give us advice that is totally biased. The most difficult thing, of course, is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. And that's a much, much more difficult lesson to take into account. Because we don't see how conflicts of interest work on us. When I was making report, in my mind, I was helping my boss. I was eliminating the data to get the true pattern of the data to shine through. I wasn't doing something bad. In my mind, But this was not the case. I was actually interfering with the process with lots of good intentions. And I think the real challenge is to figure out where are the cases in our lives where conflicts of interest work on us, and try not to trust our own intuition to overcome it, but to try to do things that prevent us from falling to these behaviors, because we can create lots of undesirable circumstances. I do want to leave you with the positive perspective, We should be sincere in our life and not allow our emotions and interests to affect our decision in the situation where conflict of interest may occur. At the end of the speech, I would like to say that “Follow your heart but don’t forget to take your brain with you.” Thank you very much.
