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    BAM2014: Reflections

    Conferences Governance Research Strategy
    So, the 28th Annual British Academy of Management Conference is now over. Something approaching 800 delegates (total attendees, including late registrations) have considered over 650 papers, workshops and symposia over the last three days, on three adjacent sites centred on the Belfast Waterfront complex. Overall, the conference was well-run—although not without some interesting nuances. A few reflections, based on my experience: 
    • That the organisers successfully marshalled delegates to twenty-something meeting rooms spread across the three sites—in half-hour slots—was a sight to behold!
    • There was only one plenary session—the opening—to bring all of the delegates together and to reinforce the conference theme. Also, the opening was scheduled after lunch on day one, and there were no other plenary sessions throughout the conference. My experience at other conferences is that the opening welcome and keynote address typically occurs at the beginning of the first day, and a plenary keynote is delivered as first scheduled session each following day of the conference. It provides a very useful means of pulling people together to reinforce the conference: a sense of purpose if you will. I hope the organisers of future BAM conferences consider adopting the more traditional programme.
    • The catering was pretty good. Finger-food was the order of the day for morning and afternoon breaks and for lunch. While there weren't enough seats, the food was such that delegates could eat standing without too much difficulty.
    • While the number parallel tracks (24 from memory?) meant that delegates had a wide range of topic and paper choices at any given point, the unwanted effect (from my perspective and many others that I spoke to) as that the audiences for many papers were small. I would rather that the conference organisers set a higher bar on paper selection (select fewer, higher quality papers) and run fewer parallel tracks, but over a full three days.
    • The conference is an academic-cum-research conference. Consequently, many of the papers were quite theoretical with only tenuous practical application. This served to highlight the chasm that often exists between research and practice. One way of minimising this chasm might be to call applied research papers and case studies. In so doing, a broader audience of managers and executives might find value in attending the conference, to hear about emerging trends that they can utilise in practice in their own environment.
    • The breaks between sessions enabled much interaction between delegates. I was able to take advantage of this as well, to meet several esteemed thinkers and to bounce ideas around.

    Next year, the conference will be held in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. I've marked my diary.
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    BAM2014: The state of #corpgov research

    Conferences Governance Performance Research
    In the last few days, I have sat through over twenty presentations on various aspects of corporate governance and made many notes to ponder over the coming days and weeks. A few of the presentations are reported in the musings below. As I walked back to the hotel this evening, I found myself thinking about the overall state of corporate governance research. Here are a few of my initial thoughts:
    • The research agenda is still dominated by quantitative research—the statistical analysis of numerical secondary data—primarily because they can't get access to boardrooms to observe what actually happens, and there is a perception that quantitative empirical research is somehow "better".
    • Researchers are starting to realise that experience counts. People like Adam Poole, Donald Nordberg, Ruth Massie (all of whom addressed the conference) all have "working backgrounds". That they understand business and what goes on in boardrooms is helpful to making sense of what boards do (and should do).
    • Corporate governance research remains a minor contributor in the field of business and management researcher. Of the 640 or more papers, less than 25 addressed the topic of corporate governance. My hope is that business schools and the researchers they employ give more attention to the topic in the coming years, given the importance of board performance to the achievement of company performance outcomes.
    • The Anglosphere continues to dominate the research landscape, despite the emergence of developing nations, and the strength of China and many Asian economies. How do we correct this imbalance?
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    BAM2014: What is "reasonably good" governance?

    Conferences Governance Performance Research
    Former Reuters reporter turned academic Donald Nordberg led a very interesting discussion on the topic of good governance. He suggested that corporate governance researchers and working directors like to think of corporate governance as being a rational and tidy activity with clearly accountabilities and readily defined boundaries. However, the reality is quite different: governance is actually quite messy, with no universally accepted definition of what corporate governance is, might be or does, let alone a common and consistent set of practices to guide boards towards this so-called nirvana of effective governance.

    Nordberg suggested that researchers and directors need to get down from their lofty pursuit of order, in favour of reasonableness and flexibility. They also need to embrace accountability in terms of giving an account of why something was done or a decision made, because the compliance view of accountability serves only to establish an adversarial relationship between parties. If researchers and boards embrace these suggestions, then "reasonably good" governance can follow, and that might just be good enough.

    Now in the twilight of his working career, Nordberg's experience—and value as someone with both practical and academic experience—was palpable. I'm glad to have listened to him speak, and thrilled to now have the opportunity to sit with him again later in the year during my next trip to England.
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    BAM2014: impact of board size and diversity on performance

    Conferences Governance Performance
    Adi Bongo and Alfred Akakpo presented updates on two oft discussed aspects of board structure and composition: board size and board diversity. 

    Bongo's paper considered data from Nigeria—his home country—to understand whether an optimal board size was apparent amongst listed companies. Previous studies have shown mixed results: some have suggested a positive correlation; some a negative correlation; and, some have shown no impact on performance. I was interested to see whether Bongo's research, which applied three different econometric methods would reveal anything new or different. The answer was no. Despite applying analysing the data in three different ways, Bongo found no evidence that board size has any impact on the financial performance of companies in Nigeria.

    Akakpo's paper explored the impact of diversity on board performance amongst companies in the retail sector in the UK. Using data from 2000–2012, Akakpo applied a range of analytical tools. His analysis showed a positive association between diversity and company performance in 46% of the companies studied, a negative association in 13% of the companies and nil or no discernible impact in the remaining 41% of the companies. Whereas other studies have suggested that diversity is generally good, Akakpo's study showed that a positive impact is certainly not automatic. 

    These studies add to the body of research that has investigated board attributes. I was hoping to hear suggestions of how or why board size or diversity might lead to increased performance, but such commentary was not forthcoming. These studies reinforce the impasse that confronts researchers; and the proposition that research methods other than the statistical analysis of quantitative data are likely to be necessary if the goal is to explain how boards influence company performance outcomes.
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    BAM2014: Like ships in the night

    Conferences Governance Performance Research
    The workshop that I attended this afternoon shone the light—brightly—on a serious problem that has troubled the research community for many years: relevancy. That academic researchers want to study SMEs and SMEs want to access up-to-date research does not necessarily make for a healthy and meaningful interchange.

    Jo Lumb (Leeds University) hosted a great session which involved the lived experience of a SME business owner and a career academic. The role play (using live material) was delightful. It served to highlight the problem: that researchers and SME business owners typically talk past each other. The discussion went like this: researchers tend to be motivated by rigour, qualified statements and a drive to publish; whereas SME business owners look for quick results, clear recommendations and common sense language. Consequently, neither "side" respects the other to any great extent.

    The challenge for the delegates in the room was to identify options to address the problem. Our table thought that the primary issues were ones of communication and of achieving a common understanding of what was required. One one hand, researchers need to get off their high-horses, to produce meaningful research with clearly articulated answers to the "so what?"  question. On the other, SME owners need to accept that their businesses are not unique, and that off-the-shelf "instant" answers are unlikely to provide sustainable answers to their problems. 

    Another idea that was discussed was to ensure that researchers spend some time in the field, to get a feel for what their research subjects experience every day. Few if any of the career researchers present had spent any meaningful time at all doing this. Just imagine how reliable any medical research might be if the researcher was not a doctor or medical specialist? SME research strikes me as being no different. Perhaps the time has come for SME researchers to down their research tools to spend some time working in and amongst those that they wish to investigate. Maybe then research requirements and outcomes will have more meaning, and the two parties will no longer be as ships in the night.
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    BAM2014: Opening sessions

    Conferences Management Performance Research
    BAM2014 got underway this morning, with a light breakfast of croissants, pastries and coffee to welcome first-time attendees (a great way to help break the ice, thank you organisers!). A series of professional development workshops followed. Seventeen topics were offered, across two workshop sessions, before lunch including:
    • The state of corporate responsibility and sustainability research
    • Developing senior leadership and management capability
    • Cognitive mapping: making sense of qualitative research data
    • Low-tech teaching
    • Researching and engaging with SMEs
    • Generating impactful research: Views from the field

    The workshop sessions were intentionally interactive, with the facilitators actively eliciting comments from, and the  experience of, the delegates in attendance. I attended the cognitive mapping session (quizzically, not really understanding much about the topic) and the generating impactful research (hoping to pick up some tips for my own research) sessions. The cognitive mapping session was really helpful. It exposed me to a method of moving meaningfully from the vast quantity of data that is typically gathered in observations and interviews toward some meaningful conclusions. However, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, because I now realise that I may have missed a trick in my research analysis—something that I'll need to give some careful though to in the coming days. The impactful research session was aimed at researchers seeking external (funding) assistance to support their research. This session was of less interest to me as I plan to return to professional practice and advisory work.

    After the lunch break, several business and academic speakers will open the conference. They will address the conference theme: The role of the business school in supporting economic and social development. In my rather limited experience, one of the shortfalls of many business colleges relates to relevance. That business research conclusions often have limited practical application is an indictment on business schools and on the research process. This should be an interesting discussion.