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    International Conference on Management, Leadership and Governance

    Conferences Governance Leadership Management Research
    Are you interested in the latest developments in management, leadership and corporate governance? If so, you might like to check out the 3rd International Conference on Management, Leadership and Governance being held in Auckland, New Zealand on Thu 12 Feb and Fri 13 Feb. Details are available here.
    The keynote speakers are:
    The two previous editions, in Bangkok and Boston, were great forums. Auckland will be no different: ideas will be shared, emergent research findings presented and new ways of improving business performance debated. In addition to the main conference topics, the following themes will be discussed during mini track sessions:
    • Pluralistic approaches to effective corporate governance research
    • The role of leadership in effective corporate governance
    • Research into cultural and gender leadership
    • Effective corporate governance
    • Effective leadership at different stages of organisational growth
    • The role of women in sustainability management
    As usual, summaries of each session will be posted here throughout the conference. Please let me know if a particular paper or conference track interests you and I will do my best to attend and report on it.
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    Boards and accountability: honoured to have article published

    Accountability Governance Leadership Management Research
    Several of the articles from the winter edition of Ethical Boardroom are now available online, including the one that the editorial board asked me to write, on accountability in the boardroom. Here's a snippet:
    The role of the director bears a weighty responsibility, so directors need to take their appointments, and the accountability that goes with such appointments, seriously. Most do, but some, clearly, flout the boundaries of moral, ethical, and in some cases, legal acceptability. Directors need to be beyond reproach. Clear demarcations of what is acceptable – and what is not – need to be established. This may mean that the curious propensity to collect directorships, as some badge of honour it would seem, needs to be called into question by shareholders and by the profession’s body. That directors with six or more appointments have any hope of providing any more than a cursory contribution is beyond us. The challenge, of course, is holding directors to account for this level of performance, among peers, in the public domain and through any legal processes that may be required.
    Click here to read the full article. Thank you to the editors for the opportunity to make a contribution. I hope it stimulates some debate and, in some small way, advances the understanding of how boards can and should contribute to business success. If you have any feedback, or would like to explore the issues raised in the article, please contact me.
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    Museum CEO exposed as ineffective. But what of the board?

    Governance Management Performance
    Te Papa, the Museum of New Zealand, is front-page news today. This time, the museum has "lifted the lid on Michael Houlihan's disastrous tenure as its chief executive"—a strong opening statement by the newspaper. Houlihan has presided over several years of poor business and financial performance since his arrival in 2010. However, two big loss-making exhibitions and the Chief Executive not coming "anywhere near meeting any of the targets we gave" led the board to its decision to agree to Houlihan's departure.
    Thankfully, the Te Papa board has now acted. A new Chief Executive has been appointed, and the museum is looking to the future. The Minister of Culture and Heritage seems to have had her confidence restored as well, now "[new] Chief Executive Rick Ellis and Chair Evan Williams are now steering the ship in the right direction".
    The newspaper suggests that the problem lay with the Chief Executive, by implying that he was ineffective. Indeed he may have been, but is that where the enquiry should stop? The Chief Executive is accountable to the board, so the board should not be beyond scrutiny. The board's job is to govern (to steer and to pilot). This is (or should be) an active role. Why did it take two years to act? Was it asleep at the wheel? Some further enquiry is likely to be beneficial—not as a witch hunt, but to reveal insights and provide guidance for other boards.
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    ECMLG2014: Closing reflections

    Conferences Governance Management Performance Phd Research
    The 10th European Conference on Management, Leadership and Governance is over. The conference organiser, Academic Conferences International, and the host, VERN' University, did a great job hosting the event in Zagreb, Croatia. I now have returned to London, ahead of some meetings with researchers and business people before flying home later in the week. Some reflections on the conference:
    • Conference numbers were steady when compared to the last couple of years. However, the quality of the papers, and the quality of the questions and informal discussions was up on recent years.
    • Notwithstanding the generally high standard, several papers should never have been accepted on to the programme. The session that I chaired was one of those that suffered in this regard: one speaker mounted a personal crusade on the topic of corruption. He vehemently rebutted questions and comments from the floor during question time even though those asking the questions and making the comments had supporting references (and the presenter did not). I hope the organisers work a little harder on the review process in the future, to ensure this type problem does not occur again. It lowers the tone of the conference unnecessarily.
    • The divide between what researchers know and what practitioners think they know is wide. It seems academic researchers continue to be quite cautious in terms of their approaches to knowledge creation, and practitioners are quite cavalier (making claims without any robust supporting evidence). This is particularly apparent in the corporate governance space, where practitioners are quite happy to claim a causal link between various structural responses (women on boards, number of independent directors) and company performance, even though the research community has produced conflicting evidence in each case.
    • Personally, I was able to test several aspects of my current research, both in the paper that I presented, and informally over food and drink. The feedback was really helpful to the refinement process. Also, I received several approaches to collaborate on some projects in the future which is quite exciting.
    • I was pleasantly surprised at the state of the Croatian economy, the openness of the people, and the general condition of Zagreb. The Berlin Wall came down 25 years ago, signalling the fall of communism in central and eastern Europe. While the Croats have embraced western ways in the cities at least, they seem to have done so without losing their rich heritage. The resultant meld appears to be quite rich.
    Sharp-eyed readers will notice that I have not reflected on my own paper, or on the session that I chaired. The reason for this is straightforward. It's pretty hard to offer anything approaching an objective critique of one's own paper, and the prospect of making comprehensive notes (to inform the blog summary) when also chairing the session is 'too hard'. If you would like a report on the session or my paper, or would like any other information about the conference, please contact me.
    Next year, the conference is being hosted by the Military Academy in Lisbon, Portugal. I met Luis and Carlos when they announced the location and the date (12–13 November 2015). They are great guys and, if the professionalism and commitment they demonstrated in Zagreb is any indication, the 11th edition of the conference promises to be a fantastic event.
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    ECMLG2014: The importance of values to performance (day 2 keynote)

    Conferences Governance Leadership Management Performance Research
    Jadranka Ivankovic, a Croatian businesswoman and VERN' University scholar, opened the second day of ECMLG 2014 with an important message: that values, and a strong values-set, are often the difference between success and failure in business.
    Speaking from an informed point of view (as a member of the Management Board of Podravka, a food manufacturing company), Ivankovic provided a timely reminder that the best strategy and management systems alone provide no guarantee of business success. Rather, successful business performance requires hard (management: plans, systems, actions, results) and soft (leadership: attitudes, values, culture, behaviours) expertise, at least.
    Ivankovic outlined how Podravka went through the process of creating, adopting and embedding a set of values in the very heart of the company. Something like 500 of the 5000 staff were directly involved, in focus groups; in informal discussions; in presentations and in communicating and championing the adopted values once they were agreed by the board. She suggested that the most successful companies are values-driven, and that if a company truly values its values set, there is actually only one boss: the values!
    While Ivankovic's message was not ground-breaking per se, it provided a timely reminder that businesses are actually constructions of people, and that without committed people, aligned to a common way of thinking, behaving and acting, then business success can be only but a dream.
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    ECMLG2014: Perceptions of board effectiveness and influence on performance

    Conferences Governance Management Performance Research
    Denis Mowbray (New Zealand) reported the results of his research into perceptions of the board's effectiveness and its influence on organisational performance. He surveyed the directors and executives, and analysed the financial performance, of publicly-listed companies in Australia and New Zealand; and he analysed the data using something called fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). This tool is useful for understanding the influence of particular variables and attributes being investigated.
    Mowbray's noted—correctly—that because boards are constructions of people and that effectiveness is likely to be dependent on how well directors and managers work together. Important elements appear to include intellectual capital, team effectiveness, knowledge sourcing and the leader-manager exchange. However, there is a distinct lack of evidence supporting how boards exert influence, even though effectiveness appears to be dependent on the board exercising control and service tasks. High levels of synergy, trust and confidence—between the board and the managers—also appear to be important. Notwithstanding these observations, the perception of the board's effectiveness appears to be related, in some way, on the current performance of the company being governed:
    • When company performance is high, the perception of the board's view of its own effectiveness and of the manager's view of the board's effectiveness is closely aligned
    • when company performance is low, the perception of the board's view of its own effectiveness and the manager's view of the board's effectiveness is poorly aligned
    Mowbray's insight was interesting, in that it identified an interesting disparity between the board's perception of its own effectiveness, and the executive's perception of board effectiveness, when company performance is poor. However, while some contributing factors were identified, no suggestions as to why the disparate views exist were proffered. The subject of Mowbray's work is important to our understanding of how boards contribute. I hope he and others pick up on the good start made by this paper, because we need to understand how if and how boards can actually influence the achievement of company performance outcomes.