Andrew Kakabadse and Nada Kakabadse’s Blog

Prompted by this story on executive payouts at Sun, in this podcast I discuss talent and how bonuses and golden parachutes reflect the end of the shareholder value world in mature markets. [...]

Recently the Mail Online broke a story about how the BBC technology chief spent £639 on taxi ride . These sorts of expenses are nothing new. The BBC, as well as the and House of Commons and House of Lords, are legacy institutions. Introducing change in legacy institutions is very difficult. The critical issue is how do you manage to adapt an old culture that is used to doing things in own way when that culture is also financially supported and so has no reason to change. [...]

Earlier this year, Ben Verwaayen, chief executive of French telecom company Alcatel-Lucent, championed the new concept of ‘cohesive capitalism’ . The idea that Verwaayen put forward is that we need a capitalism that really brings together various stakeholders rather than just focusing on the singular shareholder value. Verwaayen’s statement at the World Economic Forum seems to have been reasonably sympathetically received, but fundamentally nothing has come out of it, and I think that’s the critical point. The question is, can we have something called cohesive capitalism, which is basically shareholder value capitalism with more people cooperating? I think experience shows that the answer is no. [...]

Gary Hammel recently wrote a piece called ‘Management’s Dirty Little Secret’ on a Wall Street Journal blog. What it really focuses on is the challenge of employee engagement. It’s no easy matter to get into–on my desk at the moment I have a doctoral thesis on what it takes to get high quality engagement in an organisation, and it’s quite thick.
Engagement has three main factors. The first is intent: what does a manager really intend to do with engagement that he or she wishes to proceed with? I’ve seen many managers with the intent that this corporation should do well, but privately their drive has more to do with their personal ambition. I’ve seen many managers who intend to get an open conversation, but personally find it very difficult to raise uncomfortable issues (which is the whole purpose of engagement). Psychological conflicts of intent [...]

Last week I was quoted in an article on Time.com about the recent violence in the central Nigerian city of Jos . From the article:
Andrew Kakabadse, professor of international management development at the U.K.-based Cranfield School of Management, says oil companies have at various times pitted ethnic factions against one another for economic gain. [...]

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.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

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]