No post since 14 February - what have I been doing all these weeks ? Well, I've been to the Hockney exhibition 4 times (and will go again next week). My RA Friends subscription has been great value this year and I've been able to take lots of friends and everyone has liked it. My favourite picture is this one:

I've spent time supervising students which has really been a pleasure as I have a bright bunch at the moment. Departmental admin stuff has absorbed more time, as has entertaining visiting speakers, all of whom were really good. An excellent workshop on writing bids run by Mike Wallace and Alison Wray gave me much food for thought  and will improve my reviewing as well as my bid writing.

I've worked hard on chapter 6 and begun on chapter 7. A long silence from my co-author ended when I received the draft of chapter 4 and she says she's almost finished chapter 3. I have some time in the coming week which I'd like to use putting it all together but I also want to finish the "Be careful what you wish for" paper so that I can submit it for a conference by the end of the week. The reading pile grows and grows - several useful chats with Thom identifying parallels between the private and public sectors in accountability issues have led me to more interesting work to explore.

My application for promotion to level 2 on the professorial scale was successful but the pay rise is paltry compared to the salaries of my peers elsewhere so I am still considering putting myself and my REFable outputs on eBay.

I had a letter published in the Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/letters-bankers-pay-7561652.html
(scroll down)

This seems to have attracted some lunatic anti-feminist men who think my views support their prejudices, which is a bit scary, as well as a typewritten letter (long time since I've seen one of those) from an elderly lady, which seems to have no relevance to the topic.

I went to the ICSA conference but arrived late - fog led to the A40 being closed after an accident so I was stuck on the bus for 3 hours - and left early because of the ferocious aircon in the conference room. A very useful update on EU corporate governance developments made the trip worthwhile, though.

The weather has brightened up and Beanie the cat finally seems to be recovering from a very lengthy illness.
Much travel ahead: the trip to Vancouver in August is booked, as well as the weekend in Copenhagen in June and the Brussels workshop in May. I'll be at the BAFA conference in Brighton in April and it looks as if the research methods workshop will go ahead the following week.  

Onward and upward...

This week's excuse is something akin to toothache which is bothering me intermittently and making concentration difficult. Today I have managed to review a paper on state ownership of banks and sort out some tasks for the new post doc to be getting on with. Yesterday I did get some work done on the "be careful what you wish for" paper but was sidetracked when I had the good idea of searching on "ideal board" in Google Scholar which led me back to the classic 1985 paper on board composition by Baysinger and Butler which has been cited 1045 times! Looking through the most recent citations I found a couple of papers by US legal scholars on NEDs which I hadn't seen before. They took a long time to read - they're really like monographs - and I'm not sure that they were as helpful as I expected. They adopt the same critical perspective on independence as I'm taking in the paper but the US context is very different when you get down to the detail. There's a paper to be written on that... But as usual much time has been taken up dealing with email. Managing the departmental conference and staff development budgets has become a very time-consuming task, partly because it's difficult to get a definitive answer as to how much money is available and partly because one particular colleague is making what I consider to be outrageous requests. Little chance for reading and writing time over the next few days, many meetings...

2012 seems to be zipping past far too quickly. I'm finding it hard to make the time to write a to-do list, let alone record what I've been doing. I certainly haven't got very far with writing but I've been doing a lot of reading, mostly papers people have asked me to review, PhD students' work and funding bids. Life and death have intervened, and the weather and sick cats.

The two one-off teaching sessions last week took time to prepare. The undergraduate class was difficult. It was a much larger group than in previous years and although there were some bright students who contributed and some who had done the prep, the main group sat rather passively. Even after studying financial reporting for two years, they had little idea of the big picture and where it fitted - they could trot out the standard list of stakeholders but seemed unaware of potential informational deficiencies for different groups. I showed them a picture of the Costa Concordia and tried to get them to think about who was liable - one dim spark thought the ship was owned by "some billionaire". I think I've passed my sell-by date for teaching undergraduates, I really don't understand where they are coming from or what they expect. The post-grads were much more engaged and engaging, their general knowledge seemed far better and, for a bunch who have only been studying accounting for one semester, they were much more clued up.

The extra material for the book looks very useful. I'm waiting for my co-author to catch up by 23 Feb and then I'll spend some concentrated time on it. The post-doc fellow started last week: I've given him some stuff to read but haven't had a chance to go through the literature searching I'd like him to do before we set up the public sector NED project properly. I didn't get the Leverhulme research fellowship but I didn't really expect to, it's very competitive. We can fund our expenses through the faculty small grant scheme and time shouldn't be a problem once the book is on its way.

I want to spend the next few days on the diversity stuff. I've spent most of this morning searching for details of the oldest successful UK companies with the aim of looking at their board membership. I'm sure that there must be examples of lengthy corporate achievement by boards that don't look diverse but it's not easy to track them down.

A LinkedIn post led me to this:
http://www.biac.org/members/elsa/mtg/2012-02-workshop/OECD_Background_Paper_for_the_Worksho.pdf

which contains the best review of the literature I've seen so far, although it doesn't include any of the work of US legal scholars.

I'd love to go to Davos, just to watch all the networking at the WEF. That thought was prompted by reading Robert Peston's blog
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16702449
I'm not very keen on Peston, something about his style and strange inflection - I much prefer Stephanie Flanders' interpretation of the economic situation (and her dad was a lot more entertaining than Robert's...) But he's spot on in his comments about the impact on NEDs of encouraging investors to take more responsibility for corporate governance issues, although I think "castrating" is a bit over the top. Since the focus shifted to owners and stewardship some years ago I've asked this question at a couple of presentations by leading scholars but it's always been dismissed. I had a very interesting conversation once with an experienced NED who told me stories about the fatal effect of activist investors on boards she had sat on. Of course, there's a subtle difference between activist and active investors.

Much comment on executive pay after yesterday's statement by Vince Cable - decided that the best way of keeping up would be to put it in one of my lectures to force me to assimilate the developments.

I have been struggling to catch up with a to-do list that lengthened alarmingly when I was again hit by a bug - the cottonwool brain effect took a long time to clear and I seemed to become embroiled in meetings but this week I've recaptured some space and made some progress with more interesting things. I've managed to read and comment on two PhD theses, one for a colleague and the Belgian one - as I can't attend the private defence I have to send in my questions. I also have the new post-doc's to read which I am looking forward to. Marking a late MSc dissertation and a resit took time. Completing a REF impact statement took even longer!
I've managed to prepare my two guest lectures: the undergraduate one involves providing an exam question as well which took some time. And, as moderator for another assessment, I'll have some work to do on that shortly.

The ECGI conference at the Said was very interesting but the first day was in a room in the Law Faculty that was so cold I was shivering. Just as well that I'd read some of the papers beforehand - I could just about keep up with the fascinating discussion. The lawyers and economists really seem to work well with each other on these issues. I had a couple of useful conversations but didn't have the energy for my usual bouncing about and networking.

Am now pondering a paper that draws together my thoughts about independence and diversity with a title like "Be careful what you wish for". Crunch time for the Cadbury project next week.

Friday 6 Jan

An interesting paper ( Michael C. Withers, Amy J. Hillman and Albert A. Cannella, Jr. "A Multidisciplinary Review of the Director Selection Literature" Journal of Management 2012 38: 243) raises the question about how directors make decisions about serving on boards which I identified as an important lacuna in NED research in the paper I presented in Brussels (Dec 2010, can't believe it was more than a year ago and I still haven't found the time to write it up properly). The authors don't answer it, of course, but it's good to see it flagged up as an issue that needs to be investigated.

Their review seems very comprehensive and well-organised. I like the way they use Mace, and Lorsch and Maciver, two classic texts on directors, as ways to classify the literature. Their discussion of the bifurcated market for directors - broadly,some sought for monitoring, some for resource provision, as I understand it - raises another point. The UK literature suggested that there was a tension for NEDs between the roles of monitor and advisor (Ezzamel and Watson used the nice metaphor of wearing two hats) but the work done by Roberts, Stiles and McNulty which underpinned the Higgs report seemed to contradict that, or at least indicate that NEDs didn't see this as a problem. The difference hinges on whether a single individual is expected to perform both roles or whether the numbers of NEDs on the board is sufficient to allow the appointment of individuals to fulfil more specifically one of the two roles. As UK boards became predominantly non-exec - a later development than in the US - this could have been a factor in reducing that potential tension.

One thing that I shall certainly do if the NEDs in the public/third sector research gets off the ground is ask NEDs why they are doing the job and, if possible, investigate the appointment process.


Watching this

http://corpgov.proxyexchange.org/2012/01/video-friday-no-legal-duty-to-maximize-shareholder-value/

sent me to see what Lynn Stout has published recently and I found her 2010 book  "Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People", so I've ordered a second hand copy from Amazon (inter-library loan takes such a long time!)

I picked up the link from one of James McRitchie's useful tweets (@corpgovnet) and realised that as well as following up email and Google Reader alerts I spend quite a lot of time following up Twitter links from people like James. I've left the LinkedIn Boards and Advisors group: the traffic was very heavy and I found myself reading far too much anecdotal information posted by consultants, some with some tenuous academic connections, who have no time for rigorous academic analysis and really just want to sell their services.

But I haven't written anything other than emails today...

Thursday 5 Jan 2012

Finding it very difficult to get back into a routine and not sleeping well which makes concentration even more difficult. Spent some of this morning's very early hours literature scanning which is useful but I still have to read all the new stuff I've found. Sometimes I wish I could just shout "Stop!" like the voice on the 1950s radio programme "In Town Tonight" used to so that the flood of material on corporate governance would stop long enough for me to sort out some of the accumulation I have. My filing has been very random which doesn't help. I'm not sure if I dare ask Thom, the new post doc, to do anything quite so menial as put stuff on Endnote...

Yes, the good news is that he starts in a couple of weeks so I am busy working out which projects can be dusted off the shelf and passed on to him. I wonder if I can get him interested in visual metaphors? I've just acquired an interesting book, Visual Methodologies by Gillian Rose, which could be helpful in developing the images paper, although it doesn't have much to say on the copyright problem which is likely to be a stumbling block for publication.

The other good news is that one of our Cadbury interviewees has found some papers which may be useful. When we talked to him he promised to look and I then reminded him a year ago: we'd rather given up so it was a pleasant surprise to hear from him. Of course it may be material that's already in the archive but it will be useful to see. It also provides us an excuse to give the publishers for further delay...

Today I have managed to sort out some admin stuff like expense claims (the online system at ICAEW is very time-consuming, especially as I forget how to do it each time). I've also had a first stab at completing the REF "impact case study template" although the evidence of impact for my work is insubstantial to say the least. The paper on regulation by disclosure is in a 1* journal but it has been cited (three times!) in a recent ICAEW publication and I have an email that says that that publication is part of a pack of information circulated for discussion to members of the Financial Stability Board. Now I need to sort out material for sessions on corporate governance on the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes - at least the constant flow of events means that there are plenty of suitable topics to discuss which they may - perhaps - have heard about.