.. and the professor is on holiday this week, but it seems impossible to turn off completely if you're interested in corporate governance. Every time I open a newspaper something relevant pops out to get me thinking about research issues. And reading my Twitterfeed keeps me in touch. I have several contacts on Twitter (some of whom I know in Real Life) who do an amazingly helpful job of reading very widely and tweeting links to all sorts of useful reports and articles. I don't know how they find the time!
Usually I just take a quick look at the linked pages and bookmark them for later: sometimes later never comes.. but while I'm on leave I have time to read a bit more carefully if something really catches my attention, this for example (thanks to Dina):
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/listing-decisions-of-uk-companies-motivations
This survey provides some interesting insights into what influences companies in making decisions about listings but covered only a limited sample of 31 companies. It is full of caveats about representativeness but, as I've discovered in much recent reading, those are likely to be lost if the findings are more widely reported. (Also note that it carries the authoritative imprimatur of BIS. I wonder how they review commissioned reports: at ICAEW all the research we fund is rigorously scrutinised from start to finish.)
The topic of this example is not very controversial but in other areas it could make a big difference. The recent Credit Suisse report illustrates this:
http://www.fortefoundation.org/site/DocServer/cs_women_in_leading_positions_FINAL.pdf?docID=17902
The authors of the report make it extremely clear that they have identified correlation between gender diversity and corporate performance but that the causes of this remain opaque. Not all the press reports of this study made this clear. The CS report is pretty comprehensive but there are some important studies omitted. Sadly the only people to note this seem to be the "anti-feminist" campaigners, who are more likely to focus on the studies indicating negative correlation, just as those at the other end of the spectrum will focus on those indicating positive correlation - for example, people who, for their own political purposes, are pushing very hard for regulation to enforce greater representation of women on boards. Angela Merkel and Viviane Reding come to mind.. (Eventually my paper on all this will get written...)
We could probably use a Ben Goldacre pulling apart some of the poor press reporting of social science.
Yesterday I went to hear Raj Thamotheram speak on responsible and sustainable investing. His talk was part of a course being run by the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment
http://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/ Raj is a great speaker. You can read about him here: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=16019900&trk=tyah He has lots of experience as an investor so can talk with considerable authority about the issues. I spend much of my time thinking about how corporate power can be controlled. Raj's thinking is more positive: he wants to see corporate power harnessed and used to do good, through the influence of investors. I'm rather too old and cynical to cheer for his suggestions as to how this might be achieved but I applaud his work and really hope he can persuade like-minded people to make things happen.
He cited Unilever as an example of a company doing good beyond lip service to CSR through establishing, with WWF, the Marine Stewardship Council. I had a quick look at Unilever's web site while he was talking: 5 women NEDs out of 12, and not all recent appointments, but only two women on the "leadership executive". What we don't know is why women join boards: are they attracted to companies which are already doing good things or are they attracted to companies where they think they can make a change for the better? That's the research that someone needs to do - and do properly, so that the findings are reliable. Not short phone chats with small numbers of people selected who-knows-how (here's another: http://www.warrenpartners.co.uk/pdf/mind-the-gender-gap.pdf).
So, many thanks to my Tweeting friends for finding me links to thought-provoking stuff, even though the worst of it should sink without trace...
Thursday 29 August 2013
Friday 2 August 2013
Late spring cleaning
This is the time of year when, for the last 25 years or so, I have tidied out my office. I've just moved into a new office, my 14th office move in that time, and back into the place where I first started. Some of the offices I've inhabited no longer exist because the building housing them has vanished. Some have now been taken over by admin staff. They've all had advantages and disadvantages but one thing in common: I've never found it easy to do any work in them that required sustained thought. This means that my study at home is full of the material I use most often and would be lost without. In the days when publishers reps used to knock on my door regularly to ask about what textbooks I used and whether I would write one for them, they used to scan my shelves furtively and make quick notes about what they saw there: I always felt obliged to explain that I never used any of those books, they were the inspection copies that never made the grade.
The single filing cabinet in my office houses copies of paperwork that might be needed for future reference; copies of minutes of meetings and papers relating to all the admin responsibilities I've had over the years; and old teaching material which predates electronic versions. It could all be shredded and at some point between now and next April I shall probably have to do that. But the recent move meant that much of the stuff I no longer need has been thrown out and the office looks fairly neat and tidy.
Earlier in the year I had a blitz on my home filing cabinets and disposed of many hard copies of academic papers that are now available electronically. I've also cleared out some of my bookshelves at home and taken the books I no longer need into the office so that they can be disposed of at the next Book Harvest collection (http://www.bookharvest.co.uk/)
So, on the surface, both my office and my study look quite tidy at the moment. The untidy mess lurks within the bright shiny Mac on my study desk. I am incredibly bad at managing electronic stuff. This didn't matter much when there was less of it. When I came across a paper or web page that was directly relevant to something I was working on or teaching about, I would download it and file it (often in a file named "Interesting papers") or bookmark it. Usually I would discover these items via alerts to new journal issues which arrived by email or through following up links and citations in whatever I was reading. The files accumulated and it wasn't always easy to find things because I couldn't remember the filenames but I managed pretty well with the occasional clear out.
Yes, I used EndNote. I had an early version on my PC and thought it was an amazingly helpful tool when I first found it but over time I forgot to enter citations. I had a brief flirtation with the web version, too. Then a student told me about Mendeley which seemed better because it searched for me but I kept forgetting my password. I also discovered Diigo which seemed like a good idea but I kept forgetting about it and using conventional bookmarking instead.
Then the PC began to develop some form of technological dementia, at a point in the progress of the book which made this very worrying, so I took the plunge and bought the Mac. And discovered its neat way of dealing with downloads and its amazing Spotlight search feature. So for the last few months it hasn't seemed to matter where I put things as they were always so easy to find. And getting used to the Mac, an ongoing process, took up more time, so organising the accumulating stuff didn't happen.
And the speed of accumulation seems to have stepped up. On Twitter I follow a bunch of journalists, academics and governance practitioners who tweet links to information which is incredibly useful for work but the volume is high. Other sources of useful links are the LinkedIn discussion groups I belong to.
So all this stuff has piled up and this morning I decided to sort through the 200+ bookmarks, the 400+ downloads and the random files on my desktop. It's taken me two hours to deal with the bookmarks: all I've managed to do is consider and delete about a third of them and sort the others into folders labelled "Work" and "Misc", both of which will require further sub-folder refinement.
Yes, this is big-time displacement activity. Yes, I should be writing that review paper on board diversity. But I can't start it until I have collected all the relevant literature into one place so that I can re-read it. And I've just remembered that some of the papers have been picked up when I've been using the iPad so they are lurking there in GoodReader. So I need to use Dropbox to get them all into the same place. But I also need to sort out those Dropbox files....
The single filing cabinet in my office houses copies of paperwork that might be needed for future reference; copies of minutes of meetings and papers relating to all the admin responsibilities I've had over the years; and old teaching material which predates electronic versions. It could all be shredded and at some point between now and next April I shall probably have to do that. But the recent move meant that much of the stuff I no longer need has been thrown out and the office looks fairly neat and tidy.
Earlier in the year I had a blitz on my home filing cabinets and disposed of many hard copies of academic papers that are now available electronically. I've also cleared out some of my bookshelves at home and taken the books I no longer need into the office so that they can be disposed of at the next Book Harvest collection (http://www.bookharvest.co.uk/)
So, on the surface, both my office and my study look quite tidy at the moment. The untidy mess lurks within the bright shiny Mac on my study desk. I am incredibly bad at managing electronic stuff. This didn't matter much when there was less of it. When I came across a paper or web page that was directly relevant to something I was working on or teaching about, I would download it and file it (often in a file named "Interesting papers") or bookmark it. Usually I would discover these items via alerts to new journal issues which arrived by email or through following up links and citations in whatever I was reading. The files accumulated and it wasn't always easy to find things because I couldn't remember the filenames but I managed pretty well with the occasional clear out.
Yes, I used EndNote. I had an early version on my PC and thought it was an amazingly helpful tool when I first found it but over time I forgot to enter citations. I had a brief flirtation with the web version, too. Then a student told me about Mendeley which seemed better because it searched for me but I kept forgetting my password. I also discovered Diigo which seemed like a good idea but I kept forgetting about it and using conventional bookmarking instead.
Then the PC began to develop some form of technological dementia, at a point in the progress of the book which made this very worrying, so I took the plunge and bought the Mac. And discovered its neat way of dealing with downloads and its amazing Spotlight search feature. So for the last few months it hasn't seemed to matter where I put things as they were always so easy to find. And getting used to the Mac, an ongoing process, took up more time, so organising the accumulating stuff didn't happen.
And the speed of accumulation seems to have stepped up. On Twitter I follow a bunch of journalists, academics and governance practitioners who tweet links to information which is incredibly useful for work but the volume is high. Other sources of useful links are the LinkedIn discussion groups I belong to.
So all this stuff has piled up and this morning I decided to sort through the 200+ bookmarks, the 400+ downloads and the random files on my desktop. It's taken me two hours to deal with the bookmarks: all I've managed to do is consider and delete about a third of them and sort the others into folders labelled "Work" and "Misc", both of which will require further sub-folder refinement.
Yes, this is big-time displacement activity. Yes, I should be writing that review paper on board diversity. But I can't start it until I have collected all the relevant literature into one place so that I can re-read it. And I've just remembered that some of the papers have been picked up when I've been using the iPad so they are lurking there in GoodReader. So I need to use Dropbox to get them all into the same place. But I also need to sort out those Dropbox files....
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