The article in the Financial Times titled ‘ Innovation is all about the customer ‘ is certainly true, but what must not be forgotten is that innovation is also all about governance.
We must remember that innovation has nothing to do with invention – most innovations are transactional, and a series of progressive steps to ensure better governance and working practices.
A fundamental block on British innovation is a governance issue: boards are delegating too much of the ‘follow-through’ or application of governance to management and in an age of austerity where cost control is king, innovation and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) get sidelined.
Good governance requires scrutinizing possible blockages to governance and execution all the way down the company structure, and from my experience, there seem to be three sticking points where governance, and therefore innovation and CSR, get blocked.
These sticking points [...]

This article by Luke Johnson on the Financial Times website on why big businesses are bad for business, with the point made that the senior executives of these large organisations are very similar to public servants of large government departments, strikes a chord with me.
We are in a situation of assets being slowly controlled by fewer and fewer hands. More and more companies are interlinked through shared ownership structures, and are plagued with the bureaucracy of governance which is emerging more as protecting directors from prosecutions than actually following through on whether governance is really adding value.
Issues such as risk, vulnerability, bribery and corruption that occur outside the usual Anglo-American governance regimes is a major problem. All our studies indicate that 80 percent of business transactions outside European or American boundaries involve more than one bribe, or a substantial amount of bribery, [...]

Many recent articles, such as these from the Guardian and the BBC have been reporting that the gender gap, instead of getting closer, is widening in terms of male and female pay.
The gap is narrowing between younger age groups, but overall the gap is widening. The issue here is why, after such attention to gender for all these years and with the Davies report pending on having more women on boards, is the pay gap widening?
The articles indicate that this is still a gender-based problem, but I suspect that if this is the case then gender is not the principal reason. The principle reason is very simply one of cost.
If one looks at apprenticeships as another example, a current apprenticeship is currently positioned at half of the national wage. The underlying problem is that in the current [...]

The recent article in the Financial Times by Liz Bolshaw notes that many graduates – especially women – are unhappy in their professional roles.  It strikes me as probably being quite accurate.
What we have today is a situation where capital is not being traded, so the debt and equity markets are fairly static. If there is no trading taking place, less money is being loaned about, corporations cannot get the capital they need to function, costs are scrutinised more often, and life becomes more ‘demotivating’. If you have been exposed to easy consumption, easily accessed education and travel, as many graduates have been, then your sophistication is going to resist this demotivating aspect of constantly being scrutinised and ‘pigeon holed’ in a particular role. Younger generations are not going to like what is happening. Because they are young, they may be able to move [...]

We send women to war, to Afghanistan and now to Libya, as soldiers and as reporters, but we do not put them on boards. Why not? Are boards more dangerous than Libya or Afghanistan? I really doubt it. Do women need to be physically fitter for the board? I doubt that too. There is no need for endurance tests on the board, and it is no more dangerous than any combat zone where we send women. Women are just as capable of being on boards as men, but the argument needs to be exactly this—one of capabilities, not one of gender.
While many studies suggest that having women on a board can increase share value, as discussed in the recent Financial Times article, “ Women at top lift shares, study shows ” by Masa Serdarevic, there are just as many studies that show that shares drop when [...]

The one type of diversity that boards have continuously neglected is this skill and experience necessary to become a high performing board member.  If we take the board directors of FTSE 100 companies, every one of them has been a corporate centre director either currently or previously.
It is becoming a greater requirement that you cannot be a board member until you have had corporate centre director experience. Boards show reluctance to break from this fundamental assumption. A recent article in ABC’s The Drum , by Paula Matthewson, titled “Boards need diversity, not necessarily women” , observes that boards could benefit from searching for candidates with a broader range of skills and experience, inpependent of their gender.  Matthewson then implies that women have the potential to meet some of these selection criteria better than men. Unfortunately, today we see boards taking one demographic, women, and [...]

Prompted by this article by Daniel Gross in Slate , in this podcast I discuss the BP oil spill and why it possibly isn’t being cleaned up as quickly or efficiently as it could be. American legislation is keeping out foreign companies that might be able to do a better clean up job. Tony Hayward being caught socialising on a yacht rather than focusing on the crisis isn’t the real issue.
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In this podcast, I discuss the problem with corporate consulting firms offering awards for corporate ethics (prompted by this article ), as well as whether transparency ‘blacklists’ can actually make companies more transparent (prompted by this article ).
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The reality of work today is that, unfortunately, companies must reduce their costs, and this will probably go on until 2014 or so when we have fully come out of recession and have also paid off debt. The money supply will be restricted, and we will have private and public sector organisations fundamentally not hiring people on a full-time basis. They will be asking a lot of their full-time employees with distinct skills and experience to undertake more activities, and fundamentally offering projects to those with distinct skills, and then as soon as a project is over, the transactional relationship between the project employee and employing organisation will be over. So whoever you are, full-time employee (and there’s going to be fewer and fewer of those as time goes on), or project provider, what we will have is a situation of constantly watching the costs to make sure that they don’t go up, according to the budget set, which means that many people will be doing a lot more more for less. [...]

In this podcast, I discuss a recent article that appeared in Yale Alumni Magazine recommending six ways to give shareholders greater rights. Some of these suggestions are great, but others (such as term limits for independent directors) I wouldn’t recommend.
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