Andrew Kakabadse and Nada Kakabadse’s Blog

Prompted by this blog post by Dan Pallotta on Harvard Business Blogs, in this podcast I discuss how organisations outside the private sector should evaluate compensation. Charitable work is becoming more professional, and as it does so, it is becoming increasingly necessary to pay the market value for executives.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

An interview with Cristóbal Conde, president and CEO of SunGard, recently appeared in the New York Times . I found it particularly interesting because the debate between flatter structures and more hierarchical structures and their relevance for today is an ongoing issue.
The interview didn’t quite capture the issue of confusion between structures and culture. We cannot escape the fact that we are in mature markets. Few companies and few industries are not within the tail end of the cycle of maturity, and I would have thought an organisation like SunGard would be no exception. Mature companies tend to have ‘taller structures’ in which tasks, roles, responsibilities, accountabilities, and even governance are made very clear. You need that–you need to know what people are doing and why they are doing it because you’re going to make as much money from the products you sell and their [...]

Andrew and I, together with Dr. Isaac Mostovicz of Janus Thinking , are in the process of developing a leadership questionnaire. We would like to test and validate the questionnaire so far before we proceed any further. Can you spare 10 minutes and test out our survey? Click on the following link to take it:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/leadership_opinions
Thanks very much.

In this podcast, I address Eliot Spitzer’s recent article in Slate about how technology can help stockholders take control of the corporations they own . I believe that technology can be a minor enabler of information sharing and capture, but as long as ’shareholder value’ is the predominant philosophy, in the end stockholders just aren’t interested in governance.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Andrew and I (along with Susan Bailey and Andrew Myers) recently published two articles on technology addiction.
‘ Techno Addicts: Young Person Addiction to Technology ‘ describes the disruptive effect that technology addiction can have on positive attitudes towards learning. While students expressed little concern of addiction, technology obsession is hindering spelling skills, encouraging plagiarism and disrupting classroom learning.
‘ Techno Addicts: Life Style Through Technology ‘ examines the effects of information communication technology (ICT) on individuals. Using quantitative data from over 1,200 respondents across a broad spectrum of society ranging from lower income groups to top managers and directors, we found shocking information about how individuals adopt technology for work, personal use, and pleasure.
Both can be downloaded from Sigel Press .

I recently appeared on the BBC World Service to discuss intimate relationships in the workplace. My research has found that 60% of workers during their lifetimes have an intimate relationship in the workplace. By ‘intimate’ I mean something beyond friendship but not necessarily up to physical contact — the Greeks had a word for it: agape, meaning “divine, unconditional,
self-sacrificing, active, volitional, and thoughtful love”.
You can listen to the clip on the BBC site here . Nada and I discussed this topic in further detail in our book Intimacy .

Last week I gave the following presentation with Paul Moore and Dominic Carter at the RiskMinds conference. It highlights the results of an anonymous survey of risk professionals we conducted, looking at the causes and implications of the 2008 banking crisis.
Our findings include

that executives are to blame
that it was a cultural problem at banks, NOT a regulatory problem (the cost to benefit of risk taking is not weighted correctly)
that remuneration was too high and that culture does not encourage effective change management
that executives should have a right to tell their side of the story

We’ll post our full report when it’s released in January.
Risk Minds 2009: Risk Survey Presentation
View more presentations from kakabadse .

In advance of the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference , I recently gave a presentation at Copenhagen Business School on Business Schools, Society and Climate Change. Here is a short video overview of my presentation: [...]

The Walker report is a lowest common denominator response to addressing corporate governance at UK banks. We need a deep overhaul of the financial system: much better regulation, longer-term thinking, and a break up of the investment banking mindsets which led to the financial crisis.
Giving non-executive directors more powers, scrutinising how they are appointed, or increasing regulation alone will make absolutely no difference.  Non-executive directors already have the powers; it’s the culture of investment banking globally which must change.
Non-executive directors must spend more time understanding the bank on whose board they sit.  They have to understand the culture, get to know the key managers in the bank, and spend more time in the bank appreciating the way business is done there.  Banks also need to spend the resources to ensure their non-executives become familiar [...]

Prompted by this article about changing online habits, in this podcast Nada and I discuss information overload, online etiquette, and research we’ve done on teenage technology use.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]