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.