A conference day out

Today I went to the annual corporate governance conference of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators, ICSA. Attending practitioner conferences is always interesting: apart from meeting new people who may make useful research subjects, and possibly hearing some good speakers, you also get an insight into how practitioner organisations see themselves and how the people who run them define their role. They need to assert their specialist knowledge to carve out a commercial space for themselves. The people in charge stand out and it’s fascinating to see how they behave: their personal standing rests on how valuable practitioners believe the organisation to be.

Another issue for some practitioner organisations is their relationship to a broader profession. For example, there is no requirement for anyone working as an internal auditor to be a member of the Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors – they may well be qualified auditors through membership of a professional accountancy body but equally they may not. For company secretaries, ICSA probably has a similar relationship with the legal profession. These organisations represent a specialism, encapsulated within a specific and well-established corporate role that may well fall within a broader profession, but can they lay claim to their own professional status? What does chartered status signify for their members?

I’ve attended the ICSA conference twice before. The first time I was keen to hear a couple of the speakers and the second time (last year) I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on the impact of the Cadbury Committee. This year I again wanted to hear some of the speakers. These conferences are expensive. A long time ago my daughter worked for an events company and got me complimentary entry to several, which enabled me to make very helpful research contacts. Since then, I’ve always asked for a discount, pleading the poverty of an academic and it usually works. This time the quid pro quo for a free place was the request to write an article for the conference magazine (I’ve quoted it in full in my blog post of 30th January. I was interested to see that it was printed in full, no editing, but, as well as my name at the end, they had added the name of one of the speakers, an HR consultant, billed to speak about gender diversity: it made it look as if the article was jointly authored. I wonder how she felt about that. She may not have agreed with my views.)

The first speaker was Michael Woodford. He is an accomplished and entertaining speaker and his material held everyone rapt. The story he told was riveting. And beautifully timed – he began by saying that his talk normally takes much longer and he would have to condense it  and there was some banter towards the end with the chair but he ended on a perfect cliffhanger. So of course in the coffee break we queued up to buy the book which he signed with much pleasant chat: he is a consummate salesman and it was  a great pleasure to watch him at work. And the book is very well written – and due to be made into a film. (I asked who would play him and he said that Colin Firth had expressed interest.)

In his telling of his story (my academic scepticism clicked in early on as I wondered what the Japanese telling of this story might be) he gave a vivid glimpse of the Japanese corporate culture which is very unlike that of the West. I would have liked to learn more about the practical corporate governance issues he had encountered in running the European arm of a Japanese company, with perhaps a deeper comparative analysis to demonstrate the difficulty of transferring corporate governance mechanisms between countries. But he’s on an international speaking circuit and I guess, with a tale like his, there is little perceived need for tailoring to the specific audience.

The speaker following him was David Pitt-Watson who is an excellent speaker and had indeed tailored his talk about shareholder activism to the audience but it seemed a little pale after what had gone before.

I didn’t stay till the end of the day. I collected some very useful freebies from the exhibitors’ stands and trundled home, reading tweets to find out what I was missing. I think Twitter encourages speakers to slot in clever sound bites: I wonder if this is a positive effect? But I was pleased to see a tweet drawing attention to my article.