Andrew Kakabadse and Nada Kakabadse’s Blog

The excerpt below is from a paper of ours which will be published in the Special Issue of the Corporate Governance Journal and presented at the 2011 colloquium of EABIS, the Academy of Business in Society .
We have co-authored the paper with Isaac Mostovicz .
The paper will be published on September 5th and looks at the core values which must underpin CSR programmes if they are to be effective.
On April 20th, 2010 an explosion on the Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil rig exposed the United States to an historic ecological disaster.

This episode illustrates the limits of CSR programmes currently undertaken by global businesses. The logical rules and regulations which business and government leaders created did not work to exemplify the broadly shared social values that US society deemed to [...]

Technological advances are constantly changing the way businesses operate. ‘Cloud computing’ is the new buzzword that refers to businesses running software offsite and accessing it through Internet browsers. Although the market for cloud computing is growing, cloud service providers will need to win the confidence of service purchasers before corporations will decide to free themselves from their IT departments. A large part of this decision and the success or otherwise of taking up the software as a service model depends on the transformational capabilities of the organisation’s leadership.
In a recent FT article titled “Misconceptions about cloud computing” , authors Chris Burn and Conrad Thompson suggest that Cloud can help a company lower IT costs and improve the efficiency of IT operations, but that its true potential exists in its ability to transform business models. Cloud can stimulate innovation and offer a true competitive edge, but [...]

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, [...]

I was very pleased to see reported in BBC news on March 29 th that 71% of the British public do not believe that we are in Libya to protect Libyan lives, but that we are essentially there to get oil. There is a growing sense amongst the general public that these regime changes have not been about freedom, but rather about resource capture—a short-term gain strategy which has only served to make freedom more vulnerable.
What we are seeing right now in the debates on regime change in the Middle East is the application of a well-worked, long-term strategy that has been on the cards for the last twenty-five years, having started under Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s. The Anglo-Americans have invested multi-billions of dollars into regime change and political change to create their own markets first in Eastern Europe through the coloured revolutions [...]

We have a major concern of inequality in the UK. The recent Financial Times article, “ Unequal Recovery: middle feels the squeeze ” notes how in the UK, inflation is outpacing wage growth and income inequality continues to rise. Much of the attention and research has focused on the struggling middle classes and the growing income gap, but the real squeeze not being talked about is on children and the elderly.  The UK has the worst figures for child incarceration, child poverty and poverty of elderly in comparison to any other Anglo-American economy.
Figures coming out of one of the most right wing think tanks in the UK, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and also from the National Statistical Office indicate that 33-34% of children in the UK are living on or below the poverty line. The statistics also indicate that in any month there are 3,000 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Two types of social revolution have taken place over the last decade and are continuing to take place again right now. The first are the coloured revolutions of Moldova, Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia, whereby a lot of effort has been put into regime change, or actual political structural change, coming from bottom up. This has been very much an Anglo-American driven policy, where hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on youth groups, women’s groups, and sports groups, among others. A second type of revolution, which is happening in the whole of the Middle East right now, is referred to as the ‘Scented’ revolution or the ‘Jasmine’ revolution, namely the scent of the Middle East itself. So what we are seeing is a very interesting geopolitical trend that we have witnessed for the last ten to twelve years, now manifesting itself in the Middle East. Interestingly enough, [...]

Late in 2010, I contributed an article to Reuters’ Great Debate UK blog. This was at the same time that my colleagues and I found that the City of London was sitting on £450 billion of “lazy funds”. In the Reuters article, I argue for a change in philosophy in how money is invested: rather than privatise gain and socialise debt, as the current economy is doing, we need to be socialising capital.
You can read the full article ‘What to do about the City’s “Lazy Funds”‘ on the Reuters Great Debate UK blog :