The 2011 World Economic Forum's Global Risks report identifies corruption as one of the key risks likely to affect societies across the world in the next 10 years.
Governments and business leaders condemn corruption, and yet it spreads. In most emerging market economies corruption is prevalent if not considered a way of life.
In Russia, corruption penetrates all sectors of the society from private business to public education. Some experts estimate the cost of corruption at 20 per cent of its GDP.
Often businesses operating in Russia, especially foreign companies, are portrayed as defenceless victims of the corrupt system - obliged to comply or to get out.
Although we agree business corruption in Russia is part of a much larger phenomenon, eradication of which would require some fundamental changes in governance, our recent study of Russian and international companies operating in the country revealed a more complex and to some extent positive picture.
Not only do business owners and managers aspire for the system to change, they also engage in developing and implementing protective strategies for their enterprises and stakeholders. Those who do it successfully apply a bottom-up approach, look at specific informal practices and build awareness of particular threats. In turn, this awareness serves as foundation for the development and implementation of effective anti-corruption strategies at a company level.
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The study demonstrated that "slicing a snake" rather than dealing with it as a whole is an imperative for successfully managing corruption in Russia.
The effective anti-corruption strategies of companies conducting business in Russia reflect specifics of the industries and regions they operate in, their size, age and ownership structure, but they have a number of common elements that make them successful.
First, rather than dealing with corruption at large, effective strategies target specific practices such as leasing company facilities for personal income or paying tax authorities for conducting inspections with pre-agreed outcomes.
For example, one oil and gas company identified two areas - eradicating kickbacks to company employees from vendors and conflict of interest of its managers - as the targets of its anti-corruption strategy for the next two years and developed a plan to address them.
Second, the most senior leaders of an organisation make an anti-corruption fight their personal and business priority. Management sets specific goals, outlines a time frame for their achievement - usually 12 to 24 months - allocates resources and assigns responsibilities.
In our example, senior executives speak about preventing kickbacks and conflict of interest at every meeting with employees, explain specific actions that are considered corrupt, and take prompt and severe actions against corrupt managers regardless of their business results.
One of the key executives from that enterprise personally chaired a day-long meeting with hundreds of vendors aimed at explaining the company's anti-corruption strategy for the next two years and its rules of working with suppliers.
Third, the companies we studied provide employees and external actors with tools and instruments designed to prevent specific corrupt practices.
There are detailed "policies and procedures" for managing vendors' relationships, leaflets on defining, recognising and managing conflict of interests, video cameras installed in the offices of its purchasing managers, and telephone lines for employees and vendors to report on corrupt acts.
Such focused targeting is known to bring tangible results. On a larger scale the company has the lowest cost of capital investment per tonne of extracted oil in the Russian market, which according to its executives reflects much lower levels of vendors' kickbacks to its managers and therefore lower prices.
Fourth, the key feature of effective anti-corruption strategies in Russia is the use of both formal and informal instruments in dealing with corrupt practices.
The study shows that foreign and Russian business companies alike implement formal anti-corruption strategies.
But understanding that Russia - where the governance mode is dominated by "patrimonial power" and where decisions are made on the basis of people's relationships and traditional forms of authority - is still in transition to a "rational-legal" system where institutionalised rules become the foundation of governance, helps to adjust balance between formal and informal instruments.
Informal practices that play an essential role in daily business operations and often function to "support business" by circumventing the "red tape" and abusive, if not extortionate, regulatory practices of state officials require substitutes and alternatives. In the meantime, informal strategies are in place to regulate their scale.
A Stanislav Shekshnia is an affiliate professor of entrepreneurship and family enterprise at Insead, and Alena Ledenevais the professor of politics and society at University College London