Cleared my immediate to do list on Friday so had a rare weekend when I did no work at all. Sat in the garden and read some rather good novels (Life after Life by Kate Atkinson and The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier). Yesterday I even made a start on some of the bigger things that are outstanding but don't have close deadlines.
Today was the first of the week's outings which involved leaving home at 6 am to be in the City by 9 for a half day event run by Tomorrow's Company, their third Good Governance Forum conference. The surroundings were very palatial, the 11th floor of a law firm. The building has a central atrium with a water feature in the entrance space which contains a large narrow pillar, extending the full height of the building, which sways according to the water flow. The views are splendid although my pleasure was interrupted by a show off who wanted to tell everyone who owned each building and how much it had cost to build. I was very impressed by the glass occasional tables engraved with chess and snakes and ladders boards with the pieces all set out ready to play. There seemed to be an awful lot of fierce looking unsmiling young women lawyers dressed in black. I felt as if I'd stepped into the set of The Good Wife.
The title of the event was "Risk Blindness: why it matters and how to avoid it". We heard a lot about why it matters but few practical suggestions about avoiding it, apart from the need to draw on organisational psychologists who are clearly the latest group to move into the risk consulting arena, presumably because of the increasing focus on behavioural issues. A large number of good speakers had been assembled, all speaking rather briefly. I would really have liked to hear more from Margaret Heffernan, author of W lful Bl ndness (which is how the book title appeared in the programme and on the slides). When she said that history should be taught in business schools i wanted to cheer. I was also impressed by John Scott, the Chief Risk Officer of Zurich Global, who mentioned the work of Ulrich Beck. But in general much of what we heard was anecdotal and even when "research" was mentioned it was of the rather superficial kind produced by that breed of consultants who manage to get a university affiliation with which to brand their wares. Does that sound very snobbish? Cass and Cranfield seem happy to link up with these people, who bring excellent contacts but tend to pump out surveys or construct case studies which are quite interesting but not exactly rigorous.
A charming lady from Tata Consulting Services gave us a far too brief glimpse into what sounds like a fascinating organisation with a Code of Conduct that dates back to the 1900s. It all sounded a bit too good to be true. She talked about the importance of "bringing your best self to work". Other useful expressions: John Scott in outlining the terrifying natural risks the world faces said "Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get" which I rather liked; Dr Heffernan told us that "Business models repel disconfirming data" which was oddly abstract and depersonalised because she started her talk by emphasising that people are risks. The new word around risk is "resilience".
A great deal of emphasis was placed on how boards should be arenas of dissent, challenge and argument. It seems that these days a board that agrees is a bad board. Really?
Some of the comments on boards resonated with my own views but if Dr Heffernan is right, that's because I was looking for points that I agreed with. The issue about the shift to predominantly non-exec boards was raised and someone said (either Anthony Fry, who has been the chairman of the Premier League for just one working day and didn't want to talk about Jose Mourinho, or Sir John Egan who used to run Jaguar) that we should either make sure we stuck with the unitary board or go over completely to the two tier European system but staying somewhere in the middle was not working. Every mention of diversity was carefully couched in terms that showed the speakers were not just concerned about gender diversity. There were a couple of women from Norway in the audience and when one asked a question I thought she might mention the Norwegian experience of quotas but she rambled on about other things until the chair shut her up.
In the final session the "toolkit" was launched by Richard Sykes of PwC and Gillian Lees of CIMA. I find it quite interesting that the chap who runs AIRMIC often referred to his members (risk managers) but Gillian never mentioned CIMA members: it's as if CIMA has nothing to do with accounting at all. The toolkit seems to be a list of questions: I wonder if boards ever do use these lists to provoke discussion. Someone asked the point of the toolkit and was told that it was up to the audience to take it away and use it. Perhaps our board of governors would like copies.
The audience was mostly consultants. No academics, apart from me - well, a couple with an apparent academic link but not researchers. I found myself adopting a somewhat detached anthropological perspective as I watched the networking going on. Unusually, I felt no urge to join in but that may have been because I hadn't had any breakfast.
I came away having caught up with a couple of old friends and clutching another nicely produced report. It occurs to me that it might be interesting to analyse the TC reports, looking at the language used.
In other news, a Google Scholar alert tells me that an early paper of mine on audit committees has been cited. It is always interesting to discover that one's work has been cited inappropriately: my paper said nothing about any relationship between audit committee size and earnings management but the author who has cited it seemed to think it did. It is worth remembering that citation counts include not only those who think your work is a major contribution to knowledge but also those who disagree with your work and offer a negative critique, as well as those who get hold of the wrong end of the stick.
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