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...