Research - Peter Crow | Helping boards govern with impact

Published on: 15 March 2014

On entrepreneurial thought and action: getting the low down

Delegates at the International Conference on Management Leadership and Governance are in for a treat next week. Dr Leonard Schlesinger, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard and leading company director (including Forbes and Demandware), is the keynote speaker on Fri March 21. He'll be talking about the entrepreneurial thought process and the conversion of thinking into action.

Dr Schlesinger is highly regarded in the business and academic communities, and I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say. I'll post a summary of his talk here, as part of my commitment to provide reflections and comments throughout the ICMLG'14 conference, for the benefit of those that can't attend.

Published on: 13 March 2014

ICMLG'14: just around the corner

The International Conference on Management Leadership and Governance (ICMLG) is only a week away. This year, the conference is being held at Babson College, just outside Boston. The programme looks really interesting. I'll post reflections and comments here during the conference, so please check back if you are interested.

I leave home on Mon 17 on the Air New Zealand evening flight to San Francisco, to meet a United flight across to Boston. The conference dates are 20–21 March, so I will have some time beforehand to reacquaint myself with a city that I last visited 20 years ago, and to attend meetings with some highly regarded governance advisors who are based in Boston. My paper will be presented on the first day of the conference, and I will chair a session the second morning.

Immediately after the conference, I fly out to northern Minnesota, to visit the family I lived with as an exchange student 35 years ago. It'll be my first trip back since 1990, and possibly the last time I see my now elderly host parents. While the schedule is tight, I am looking forward to this trip very much. I'll keep you informed.

Published on: 8 March 2014

On women in leadership, the glass ceiling and statistics

The glass ceiling seems to be alive and operating well in New Zealand—or so a reporter's interpretation of a recently published report by Grant Thornton would have us believe.

Whereas New Zealand was the first country in the world to embrace universal adult suffrage, it now ranks 15th in terms of the proportion of senior executive positions held by women (down from fourth a decade ago). The reporter seems to have used this statistic to make the glass ceiling claim. The Grant Thornton spokesman has made similar claims. However, when one reads the Grant Thornton report more carefully, the picture is actually somewhat different. The global average has also stalled. The proportion of women in senior executive positions jumped from 19% to 24% in the three years from 2004 to 2007 but has remained largely static since. (The New Zealand proportion is 31%.)

Rather than make speculative claims, of a glass ceiling, the discussion needs to centre on why the proportion has stalled. It could be that a quarter to a third is representative of the number of effective female leaders available to contribute. Or, it could be that more are willing, but they lack the expertise to be truly effective when measured against male counterparts. Or, it could be due to a myriad of other contributing factors. Whatever the reason, business and society would be well served by finding out. Notwithstanding this, simplistic approaches (like counting things) are unhelpful. They cannot produce anything more than correlations, statements of what 'is' and emotive claims. The problem is complex, so a different research approach is required to reveal the underlying mechanisms. However, such research is typically slow and demanding, as I've discovered in my own research work. In the meantime, reporters like Mr Foreman would be well served by taking a little more care in their reporting.

* For the record, I am a strong advocate of appointing the best and most capable person to any role, regardless of their gender or any other diversity variable.

Published on: 27 February 2014

Advancing governance research beyond correlations

A couple of months ago, I was asked to consider submitting a paper to the British Academy of Management (BAM), for presentation at the annual conference (in Belfast, Northern Ireland this year). The BAM conference is attended by over 850 delegates, from academia and the working world. Once I got over the surprise of being asked to contribute to such an esteemed conference, the challenge of choosing a topic loomed large in my mind.

The topic I have selected plays to the foundation of my current research work: that of finding a way to move beyond the limitations of the research methods that have been favoured by many governance researchers. Researchers are really good at counting and measuring things, but the process of digging deeper, to explain why something is as it is (in my case, how boards influence company performance) has proved to be much harder. The aim of the paper I have written is two-fold:

Challenge the foundational assumptions and normative input-output approach that has dominated the much of governance research agenda
Suggest an alternative approach to governance research, to enable the researchers to move beyond correlations toward the postulation of credible explanations and theories

The paper was submitted last night. The ideas in it are somewhat contentious, so it will be interesting to see how the paper is received, and whether it is accepted on the programme. Please contact me if you'd like a sneak-peak at the abstract now, or to be sent a copy of the paper after it is presented.

Published on: 20 February 2014

My multifaceted week: the life of a governance researcher

Please excuse my silence over the last ten days or so. I have been concentrating on several important research tasks and some family matters, and this has precluded me writing any musings. To give you an idea, here's a list of some of my activities from the last week:

Prepared for and observed the February meeting of the Company Alpha(*) board, to collect more research data.
Prepared for the next observation of the Company Beta board, to occur in a few days' time.
Attended a PhD forum, a new initiative run by Massey University School of Management to bring its doctoral candidates together from the three campuses for support, encouragement and technical assistance with the process of research.
Reviewed feedback provided by my supervisors, of the first substantive draft of the research methodology chapter that I sent them a couple of weeks ago.
Continued the refinement process of the methodology chapter, ahead of reforming it into a standalone paper suitable for submission to the BAM conference.
Hosted guests visiting from Belgium. Our daughter's host parents from her twelve-month student exchange to Flanders are on holiday in New Zealand at present.
Drove our daughter and her gear to Massey University (90-100 minutes drive north of our home), to start her tertiary career. (She's enrolled in the Business Studies programme, and will be living on-campus in one of the hostels.)

I'm hoping things will settle down a little next week, so I can finalise the BAM paper; spend some more time on data analysis; start thinking about the slidedeck for my presentation to the International Conference on Management, Leadership and Governance in Boston, Mass. on 20–21 March; and, resume normal transmission on Musings.

(*) Companies Alpha and Beta are the two companies who have provided me with access to observe their boards in action and collect governance data. Both are quasi-public, high-growth organisations of substance domiciled in New Zealand. Anonymity is a condition of research so all other information that may enable the companies to be identified is withheld.

Published on: 12 February 2014

The "Learning Board": a good model

Over the last few months, I have re-read quite a few books and articles about models of governance, to see how my doctoral research might build on the suggestions of earlier contributors. Many years ago my father taught me that building on the work of others is smart, but only when the prior work is solid—a stable foundation being crucial to anything that follows.

The "Learning Board", developed and suggested by Bob Garratt nearly twenty years ago, is one of the models that has captured my attention. Garratt published his suggestions in a profoundly titled book The Fish Rots from the Head (3rd edition). Garratt highlights four key tasks of directors within the context of a board's lifecycle:

policy formulation and oversight
strategic thinking
supervising management
ensuring accountability.

He suggests that boards need to balance four intellectual viewpoints simultaneously in order to achieve the four key tasks. When they do, overall effectiveness can be enhanced.

An external perspective
An internal perspective
A short-term perspective
A long-term perspective.

I found this to be very helpful, because it provides a useful context for my work (an investigation of how boards can influence company performance, and the influence of strategic decision-making). Regardless of my efforts though, I commend Garratt's book to aspiring and established directors. It's easy to read, and logical in its approach to the topic.

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