Kirsten Liston

Founder and CEO

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Kirsten founded and runs Rethink Compliance LLC (Rethink), a compliance industry leader that is dedicated to empowering organizations to create real behavior and culture change. A repeat honoree on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies, Rethink serves more than 125 of the world’s great companies, and its products and services reach millions of global employees each year.

Kirsten first joined the compliance industry in 2000, working with leading Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies to implement strategies and tactics to reduce compliance, ethics, and reputational risk, including through employee training and awareness.

While at Integrity Interactive, she created one of the first-ever compliance training libraries in the industry, with more than 500 titles and 20,000 translations when SAI Global (now SAI360) purchased the business. She built out the content team and operations as the business scaled.

Kirsten has extensive experience creating materials to address a wide variety of compliance topics, from industry-specific concerns in pharmaceutical, automotive, and consumer products businesses to general corporate compliance topics like competition law, anti-bribery, privacy, and respect. She and her team have repeatedly driven product innovation in the space — from pioneering the use of spoken word poetry in training materials to releasing some of the first-ever compliance whiteboard videos in 2014. Rethink’s materials routinely get high marks and unsolicited praise from compliance professionals and the general employee population alike.

Kirsten is a former journalist, writing for Minnesota Law & Politics and Super Lawyers. Her articles have been published in Compliance & Ethics Magazine, Compliance & Ethics Professional, Compliance Week, and Directors & Boards. She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, including events hosted by Compliance Week, Ethisphere, the Ethics and Compliance Initiative (ECI), and the Society for Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE).

Education and Certifications

  • B.A., English, Carleton College
  • Business Fellows Program, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business
  • EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women Class of 2021
  • 2023 Enterprising Women of the Year
  • 2024 Colorado Titan 100

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