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    Is it better to give, or to receive?

    Conferences Governance Phd Research Time Management
    Do you know the origin of the well-known saying 'it's better to give than receive'? This phrase (from the Bible) calls our focus into question: are we better to have an outward mindset for the benefit of others, or to concentrate on self? This dilemma has been front of mind over the last twenty-four hours. The following list is a snapshot of the important giving and receiving tasks that I need to complete over the next seven days:
    • This morning: Re-read parts of my doctoral thesis, working through various scenarios that might be raised during the oral examination. This is a receiving task—it's for my benefit.
    • This afternoon: Start work on the slide deck to accompany my paper to be presented in Brussels next week. This is a preparation task, ahead of a giving activity.
    • This evening: Fly to Hamilton to ahead of presenting on the Institute of Directors' Company Directors Course tomorrow. The task at hand is threefold—to present the Strategy Day material, facilitate discussion and share insights. This is primarily a giving task.
    • Wednesday: At the home office, making final preparations for the oral examination.
    • Thursday: Drive to Palmerston North, for the oral examination of my doctoral research. After three-and-a-half years effort, it all comes down to this meeting. No pressure!
    • Friday: Finalise the slide deck for the EIASM presentation and write a letter to confirm an important speaking and facilitation engagement—both after some reflection on the outcome of the previous day's activity, no doubt.
    • Monday 26: Leave for Brussels via London, to attend and speak at the 12th European Institute of Advanced Management Studies Corporate Governance Workshop. Summaries of this giving and receiving activity will be posted here later next week.
    So, a busy seven days lies in wait, with some important giving and receiving tasks along the way. My week highlights a dilemma faced by many busy people: where should one's priorities be placed? All of the tasks are important—but are any more important? If compromises are required, what should prevail? Better to spend time preparing for the teaching and speaking commitments, or the examination—to give or to receive? If you are facing a similar challenge this week, what yardstick will you use to make your choices? ​
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    Corporate governance & board performance: emerging research

    Conferences Decision Making Governance Performance Phd Research
    Are you interested in the latest developments in board and corporate governance research? If so, you might like a sneak peek at two new papers, both of which have practical implications for board research and boards in action. The full papers will be presented at two leading corporate governance conferences in Europe in November.
    Summaries of conference presentations will be posted here during the conferences. Use EIASM15 or ECMLG15 in the search field to go directly to the postings. 
    If you are interested in attending the conferences or want to know more about them, follow these links to the EIASM and ECMLG conference pages. If you want more information about my research (including its practical application in boardrooms), please get in touch.
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    Want to learn about emerging corporate governance and board practice themes?

    Conferences Governance Leadership Performance Speaking Engagements
    Is effective corporate governance and board practice, in pursuit of high business performance, an important priority for you and your colleagues? If so, please read on. 
    From 1 September, I will be meeting with directors, executives and researchers in several UK cities (London, Wolverhampton, Leeds, Dublin, Belfast and Canterbury) to discuss the role of the board in influencing business performance. While the schedule for my eleven-day visit is fairly full, some gaps remain for additional meetings. Please get in touch if you wish to meet or have a private chat. Alternatively, you may wish to introduce yourself at one of these public events:
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    ICGN, IGW, EURAM : Post-conference reflections

    Conferences Decision Making Governance Leadership Research Strategy
    • All of the host organisations rang great conferences. Thanks ICGN, Toulouse Business School and Kozminski University! That you attracted and hosted delegates from around the world, and stage-managed them to the correct venues and activities at the correct time, and fed and watered them, and attracted great speakers like Bob Monks, Martin Wolf and Lech Wałęsa to speak is a testament to the quality and reputation of your organisations.
    • The 20th ICGN annual conference was a lavish affair with close to five hundred delegates in attendance. Of the three conferences, this was the most commercially focussed one. Most of the delegates were active in the institutional investor community. Serving company directors and academic researchers were very much in the minority. While this conference has a well-established constituency, I could not help but think that the quality of the conversation, and the impact on board practice and business performance, would be enhanced if more serving company directors and board researchers were in attendance, both to speak and to participate in the debate. 
    • The International Governance Workshop, in Barcelona, was the smallest of the three conferences—by a long way. Fewer than thirty board research scholars assembled to discuss emergent themes. Yet, the quality of the discussion was outstanding. That the conference has managed to attract such a strong cohort of esteemed scholars is amazing, especially when the cost of getting to conferences and the plethora of choices is taken into consideration. This workshop is on my 'must attend' list.
    • EURAM is a good forum within which to exchange management ideas. I overheard many enthusiastic discussions in hallways and over coffee and food. It's a pity that the conference only attracts academics (which is perhaps not surprising, as EURAM is an academy after all). Notwithstanding this, the EURAM executive may wish to take steps to bridge the academy–practice divide by inviting more business people, to address the conference and to participate as delegates. 
    • A concern about EURAM? Membership is steady at about 1200 members. About 1300 papers were submitted, of which 650 were accepted onto the programme after the review process (the corporate governance special interest group received 60 papers, of which 46 were accepted). These numbers make good reading, until the surface is scratched. It turns out that EURAM experiences a 70 per cent turnover in membership each year (yes, seventy per cent)! That EURAM experiences this level of churn should be ringing alarm bells. Something about the organisation is broken, or are academics simply being mercenary (buying a membership only for those years that they attend the conference)?
    The last three weeks have been great, although progress towards 'effective corporate governance' remains torturously slow. Notwithstanding this, I met some amazing people and learnt a lot. The challenge now is to assimilate the newfound knowledge, and to incorporate it into my advisory work and research, so that directors and boards can gain benefits as well. If you wish to know more, or arrange for me to speak with your board, please contact me directly.
    The annual European Academy of Management conference is done for another year. Consequently, my commitments in the UK and Europe are also done. As I make way home (my favourite destination!) and reflect on both EURAM and the two preceding conferences (International Corporate Governance Network and International Governance Workshop), the following ideas and observations come to mind:
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    EURAM'15: So, what about outside directors?

    Conferences Governance Leadership Performance Research
    I had the pleasure of chairing a corporate governance topic session at EURAM this year, in which three papers on outside directors were presented. Each of the studies were fascinating. The first one explored director motivations, and the other two added emerging market contexts (China and India):
    • Axel Walther, Germany, presented a very interesting paper about the motivations of non-executive directors and board effectiveness. While many board researchers limit their investigations to a limited range of established board–management interactions theory (including most often agency theory), Walther and his colleagues incorporated organisational behaviour and psychology literature and theory in an effort to understand director motivations. This inter-discipline approach offers exciting possibilities for board research. While the results of the case research are preliminary, they did demonstrate that the motivational drivers of non-executive directors are complex, and that a straightforward split between intrinsic and extrinsic factors is somewhat simplistic. A more subtle differentiation is needed. The team has identified some possibilities. More analysis is now underway, to try to dig deeper into the data to try to isolate triggers to various motivations. From there, it may be possible to re-approach the original question, of the relationship between director motivations and board effectiveness.
    • Wenxuan Hou Hou, a Chinese national living and studying at University of Edinburgh, has been investigating non-executive directors in Chinese firms. Prior studies of director behaviours have reported mixed results. Wen decided to extend the research into an unstudied area—behaviour relating to dissenting director decisions. In China, voting in public company boardrooms must be made public. Thus any dissenting votes should be identifiable. Interestingly, the analysis conducted by Wen showed that a tiny percentage of the decisions made by Chinese boards included any dissenting votes, suggesting the voting tended to be unanimous. Wen concluded that it was unlikely that all directors agreed with proposals all of the time, but that other factors including 'power' and 'cultural norms' were likely to be moderating the decision preferences of directors. This raised the question of alignment. Were directors just following the leader (the chairman or the chief executive), or were they genuinely in agreement in proposals requiring decisions. Wen couldn't answer that question. However, he did say that further (qualitative) research might reveal what is actually going on. I suspect direct observations within Chinese boardrooms will be required, but that prove to be a difficult challenge!
    • Tara Shankar Shaw reported the findings of his quantitative study of data collective from Indian companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE500). Shaw wanted to find out whether institutional theory might offer explanatory support for any relationship between non-executive directors and firm performance. The audience pricked up their ears, because it sounded as though Shaw might be going to reveal a cause-and-effect relationship from the data. However, and to Shaw's credit, causality was not claimed (straightforward causality is rare in natural science and unheard of in social science). Rather, he reported mixed results (as would be expected in a quantitative study of this type). Shaw study was helpful, in that it added to the growing list of studies that challenge suggestions that any given board structure or composition is conducive, let alone causal, to firm performance.
    Perhaps the strongest message from this session was one that wasn't explicitly stated: that statistical analyses of quantitative data can only ever reveal correlations between variables (attributes) of interest—because variable measure change, not reasons. My hope is that researchers start to move beyond simply counting things, and soon. Precious research time would be far better spent collecting primary data, ideally from inside boardrooms, to understand what boards actually do, and then to draw conclusions from there.
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    EURAM'15: Governance in social enterprises

    Conferences Decision Making Governance Leadership Research
    If you were to look across the board research landscape, the view would be dominated by studies of large, publicly-listed (and typically Anglo–American) corporations. Small-medium enterprises,  family-owned businesses and businesses in emerging economies have received far less attention (although this is starting to change), and social enterprises even less so.
    Saskia Crucke, of Ghent University in Belgium, is interested in social enterprises and, more specifically, in the governance function. She reported the preliminary results of a study that is considering governance in a category of social enterprise called Work Integration Social Enterprise (WISE). WISEs help disadvantaged or disabled people enter or return to the workforce.
    Crucke is using an organisational behaviour construct called 'faultlines' to try to understand why some WISEs perform better than others. She used a two-stage questionnaire (the first to ask the chairman and CEO about the WISE, and the second to ask all board members questions about decision-making and performance) to collect data from several dozen Belgian WISEs for analysis. Her preliminary findings show that where faultlines exist, decision-making is impaired and organisational performance is weaker.
    While this result may sound self-evident to some, it does provide a useful platform for further (qualitative) research, to discover how and why decision-making is compromised, and to inform board member recruitment. If faultlines can be minimised, then higher levels of organisational performance may be possible on an on-going bass. For a sector that is typically cash-strapped, that would be a very good outcome.