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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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.
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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
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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 [...]

Last week I gave a presentation at the EABIS Colloquium in Barcelona entitled ‘Corporate Governance: Global Issues for the Future’. Here are the slides:
Corporate Governance: Global Issues for the Future
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Following on the heels of the MP expenses scandal, the issue of expenses at another public body, the BBC, has recently been in the news . I was hired by the BBC for some particular tasks. Then their major issue was cutting their costs, and the issue continues to remain unaddressed today. Well, not entirely unaddressed—a number of directors general have tried to reduce the cost base of the BBC over the years, and the message from within the BBC is that costs have partly been reduced, but there are a lot more still to take out.
In the press, current director general Mark Thompson has defended his ‘high for a public servant’ salary as entirely justified as it’s only one third of what a private sector executive in his position would get. I’m not sure if this is a fair position, but I do know [...]

Executive pay is clearly out of touch with executive performance.
In the past 30 years or so, while real growth has been difficult to come by in mature markets, executive performance has become short-term transactional (i.e. through the buying and selling of businesses at inflated prices). These transactions have been executed in order to bolster a company’s share price in the short term. For a long time these transactional results seemed positive, and executive pay correspondingly grew. [...]