Friday 29 October 2010

Welcome to the Governance Beyond Boardroom Network

Thank you to all those colleagues who attended the original seminar at the end of September 2010. It was great to see you all there, to see the lively debate amongst the group, and to see some productive contacts being made throughout the morning. Thank you also to those have already provided feedback on how the project progresses, please keep the suggestions coming - this is an open network where all ideas are welcome!

The presentations are now live on the project's website (click here) , as is a link to this blog. This medium seems to be the quickest and easiest way to link you all up. So please reply to these postings directly or send me your comments and I will post as new topics. I will create an email group to inform you when a new postings appear, and aim to send updates monthly.

As we said at the seminar, we believe the 'Governance Beyond Boardroom' agenda opens up a number of new research streams. We also agreed that the network is a good vehicle for matching potential projects with both research council and private sector funding. Please have a look through the list below and make additions/suggestions so we can start to build a picture for which projects we should seek funding. I will be posting a separate blog on how we can prioritise this list.

The 12 potential research projects that seemed to be most interesting amongst the seminar participants are (in no particular order):

1. A Stakeholder Definition of Corporate Governance. Issues raised include: status of legislative and regulatory definition; understanding the relationship between profit maximising, enlightened shareholders and stakeholder focus; who is a stakeholder; empirical measures for stakeholder engagement.

2. Management of the GRC (governance, risk and compliance) function. Issues raised include: management skills weakness; who in the organisation sets the governance culture; relative importance of non-profit generating corporate functions.

3. Governance Beyond the Boardroom in other sectors. Issues raised include: is the financial services sector peculiar in the role/importance of SubAgents; what industry-specific issues can be isolated in other sectors; can/should regulators identify core vs. sector-specific governance issues?

4. Exploring the Principal-Agent-SubAgent model. Issues raised include: the 'dotted line' link between Principal and SubAgent; whether CEOs and Boards recognise culture as an operational concept; whether this model presumes the breaking up of large banks; sequence/dynamic of the issues identified in the research (i.e. 'what is corporate governance' needs to come before 'drivers of corporate governance' or 'business case').

5. The linking architecture of governance between junior and senior levels. Issues raised include: the role, purpose and practice of Board subcommittees; corporate norms vs. rules; case studies of corporate induction programmes.

6. Complexity as a link between corporate culture, strategy and governance. Issues raised include: building on the work of the Complexity Group led by Prof Eve Mitleton-Kelly (LSE) and Prof Chris Mallin (Birmingham); identifying how to gain research access to large financial institutions; potential for in-depth study of financial services institution.

7. The context of corporate culture. Issues raised include cross-cultural Joint Venture projects; universal standards of corporate behaviour; impact of 2010 Bribery Act.

8. Alternatives to the tickbox mentality. Issues raised include: development and assessment of qualitative metrics; narrative reporting options; regulator assessment on non-quantitative metrics.

9. The business case for stronger governance. Issues raised include: correlation between strengthening governance regimes and bottom line effect; other relevant metrics (e.g. reputation, recruitment & retention, analyst assessment); sector-specific business success metrics (e.g. brand awareness in FMCG sector).

10. What does good governance look like? Issues raised include: case study development; criteria of good governance; is good governance the absence of poor governance?

11. Who 'lives' corporate culture? Issues raised include: informal reporting structures; introducing corporate culture KPIs; Board-level engagement with culture programmes.

12. How to instill a corporate culture. Issues raised include: efficacy of training programmes; quantitative metrics of culture change programmes; different delivery mechanisms of culture change programmes.

I am sure there are many more suggestions that I have missed! Please reply to this blog to add more research streams and suggestions.

Many thanks, Andrew