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 [...]

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 [...]

In our research of over 12,500 organisations, we found that it is often difficult to deal with sensitive issues arising in the workplace, largely because often the very people in the room are part of the problem as well. This means that more often than not you have a sensitive issue as well as a sensitive relationship, leading to an “elephant in the room” type of situation, as typified in this blog post on the Harvard Business Review website .
Where there is a diversity of opinion, or the issue is complex, or one director does not completely trust the judgement of another, then finding the strength to have that difficult conversation is identified as not easily forthcoming. Pleasing people is the easy way out, and is a common phenomenon.  Sensitive problems, such as affairs in the workplace, or bullying, can see managers and [...]

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 [...]

One of the most successful factors for any global leader today is to be two things at once: sensitive to your team and your community, but tough on issues, and why? – because this is what is required for the high performing executive. However, the more that anyone is exposed to having to work at two extreme ends, two extreme emotional ends day by day, the more fatigued they become. Their capacity to withstand pressure diminishes.
The resilience issue has arisen because we are asking people to constantly do two completely opposite things at exactly the same time, but without properly building their capacity to handle these contrasts. Resilience concerns are not of those who are, let us say, ‘unabled’. Rather, resilience concerns are of those who are actually very able and excellent; it is a concern of those who are great, not those who are not [...]

The UK government’s recent decision to phase out the Default Retirement Age (DRA) may be a very good thing when one considers the importance of ‘crystallised intelligence’—the ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience. New research from Creditsafe, discussed in the article, “ Older shoulders can take the weight of retirement” , reveals that pensionable directors can be highly desirable and that the rising retirement age should not necessarily be a cause for concern. This trend and our research findings suggest that older leaders not only can continue to make significant contributions as their ‘native mental ability’ starts to decline, but they may even be becoming better leaders in the ageing process.
Research in neuroscience shows that ‘fluid intelligence’, or the ability to think and reason logically and solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge, tends to decline with the age. On the other hand, [...]

The reality of geopolitics today is that the boundary between the corporation and government is now indistinguishable. The two have overlapped so much that we really should be training our future business managers on how to navigate and influence complex policy environments as well. A recent article by Jonathan Doh and Guy Pfeffermann in the Financial Times, titled “Top schools face globalisation challenge” , observes how business schools fail to address the different demands of leadership today. Business schools seem to concentrate too much on organisational and strategic leadership, while neglecting governance leadership, and stopping entirely short of policy-design leadership.
Unfortunately, business schools do not think to generate models that really look at this overarching form of leadership. It is interesting how many bright people you get walking into interesting jobs and yet they are not educated for them. The business school of the future is [...]

The article by Ian Wylie in the Financial Times, entitled “ From charity to teacher, Oxfam sets sights on MBAs ”, is indicative of the trend where business school training is now setting its sights on meeting some of the needs, challenges and concerns of third sector organisations. At the School for Leadership at Exeter University, a third sector MBA has virtually been created which tries to hit the whole of this sector in terms of providing business discipline application but with a stakeholder philosophy. The internships that MBA programmes traditionally try to pursue, particularly in financial services, are being balanced by offering work experience in third sector organisations with Oxfam being just one of them. The idea behind this is to see whether a more sustainable, green way of living and operating can be the way of the future.
I have mixed views on this. The [...]

A very interesting article in Harvard Business Review by Ian Bremmer and David Gordon, The Conversation , draws to the surface one of the most critical issues we are facing today, and that is whether the major powers of the world can collaborate or not. The article indicates that there are a number of worrying trends: Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and Mexico. My view is that what is happening is the world is splitting into two and we are beginning to see the Anglo-American allies concentrating in one end and the Chinese and their allies concentrating in the other. Certainly Brazil is much more aligned with China than Anglo-American interests. It does also seem as if the attack on South Korea by North Korea was simply a warning to Anglo-American interests that if Iran is bombed then there will be serious problems, and that North Korea will [...]

The Guardian recently ran an interesting story about England football manager Fabio Capello; his compensation package if he gets dismissed was cited as a possible reason not to remove him. In this podcast, I discuss what went wrong for England’s football team at the World Cup: some combination of the team’s psychology, the sport’s governance, and/or the manager’s coaching style.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]