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 [...]

Whether organisations are at the point of finding a new role at the senior level, namely the Chief Sustainability Officer, depends on how CSR and sustainability are being interpreted. In other words, ‘sustainability of what?’ Unfortunately, for too many Anglo-American corporations, CSR and sustainability is a marketing ploy. So in the Anglo-American model, I do not see any movement that will make real space for the CSO officer. However, not all societies approach CSR and sustainability from this same philanthropic platform, and I expect the role of this officer to be stronger in other countries that hold a different view of CSR.
The office of a CSO is unlikely to have the same meaning for an Anglo-American corporation against a major Danish firm, to a German firm, like BMW. The sustainability concern of Anglo-Americans is to identify the charities that basically add to commercial advantage or at [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

Is the global financial crisis motivating people to seek extramarital affairs? Anecdotal evidence from FT columnist Lucy Kellaway suggests this is the case . In the process of doing research for a novel, she found that the adultery-enabling website Illicit Encounters has seen a 300% increase in registrations from London-based men in the financial sector since September. [...]