I've read two interesting articles this week. One by Gillian Tett in the FT: "A thicket of laws strangling the land of the free?" and one by Alex Edmans in economia, on Kodak.
Alex argues that Kodak's demise is an example of poor corporate governance because good corporate governance should not only focus on preventing egregious behaviour with regard to management rewards but also on the promotion of proactive innovation, which is where Kodak failed.
This reminded me that I had once written about the tension between enterprise and accountability. I find it a slightly worrying experience to reread things I wrote a long time ago. It's not a very good paper although it's interesting to see how much of it prefigures thinking that I developed in later publications. And I was surprised that it had gathered some quite recent citations, given that the corporate governance literature has expanded so much in the twenty years since I wrote it. But the point that I think I made and that Alex makes more cogently is the importance of balance in corporate governance and the need to think carefully about the impact of regulatory policy on long term value creation objectives.
Gillian Tett's article explores the increasing development of rules and bureaucracy and by implication its impact on innovation. She comments that "..the surplus of modern rules and bureaucracy has not emerged by accident: on the contrary, it reflects a mixture of powerful vested interests and (sometimes) well-meaning efforts to protect consumers and workers from exploitation." This prompted me to reflect on the management of risk and its use as a means of placing blame, which her article does not mention as a motive for regulation and which Mike Page and I discussed in our paper "Risk management: the reinvention of internal control and the changing role of internal audit" - another paper written about twenty years ago which stands up rather better to the test of time judging by its citation history.
Gillian Tett mentions the work of anthropologist David Graeber; we drew on the work of another anthropologist, Mary Douglas. There is much to be said for interdisciplinary approaches which can enable different perspectives on corporate governance and can raise broader issues for policy consideration beyond a focus on regulatory compliance.
Tuesday 11 June 2019
Invisible Women
I have been trying to read "Invisible Women: exposing data bias in a world designed for men" by Caroline Criado Perez but I have given up. Which is disappointing because I have much sympathy with the author's argument, I just don't like her style. Her passion comes across to me as hectoring and, although she provides a great deal of evidence, I find an endnote in every other sentence very distracting. I'm a reader who follows them all up but in this case not only is the quantity overwhelming but I also found the quality worrying. I prefer to see research evidence from the horse's mouth rather than filtered through media reports. It doesn't claim to be an academic book but for this reader rigour is important. Anecdotes are good hooks to capture reader interest but they are not data.
A couple of examples of things that bugged me in the first 100 pages.
1. On page 97 Criado Perez asserts that women receive less credit for jointly authored academic papers than men do. This article from the New York times is the reference to back up this assertion. A respectable author but I still dug around, followed the link to the working paper, checked to see if it had been published in a peer-reviewed journal (it has), thought briefly about comparing the working paper with the published version but decided life is too short. But I'm not convinced that there would be similar evidence in Europe and found myself irritated by generalisations based on a narrow US context.
2. In the early section on transport, the author clearly believes that if more women were involved in transport planning, transport policy would be more female friendly. This is very much like the belief that more women on boards would make them more effective and I've ranted on about that quite enough. The section on toilets must surely demonstrate that this assumption is flawed: I am sure that there are female architects involved in designing public buildings but there is always a queue for the ladies.
The accounts of the toilet problems of women in less developed countries were horrifying but Criado Perez is too young to know that the UK situation used to be much worse than now. Women used to have to pay a penny to use a public loo: men paid nothing. A wonderful Labour MP named Barbara Castle did more for women than many other female MPs ever had when she got that charge abolished.
I realised that I am not the target audience for this book. I'm not entirely sure who is but it may open up some useful conversations. Criado Perez' argument is important but we also need to recognise that there is some danger in expecting significant and fast change from increasing female representation.
Then I opened the June issue of economia. I always start with the disciplinary listings since someone observed that true equality in the profession would not be achieved until there were as many women being hauled up for disciplinary offences as there were men. On that basis we still have some way to go.
But look at this. Page 14. Strapline at the top of the page. "From the Institute this month: A woman steps up as ICAEW president..." Can you imagine reading "A man steps up as ICAEW president"? Maybe this just proves Criado Perez' point.
A couple of examples of things that bugged me in the first 100 pages.
1. On page 97 Criado Perez asserts that women receive less credit for jointly authored academic papers than men do. This article from the New York times is the reference to back up this assertion. A respectable author but I still dug around, followed the link to the working paper, checked to see if it had been published in a peer-reviewed journal (it has), thought briefly about comparing the working paper with the published version but decided life is too short. But I'm not convinced that there would be similar evidence in Europe and found myself irritated by generalisations based on a narrow US context.
2. In the early section on transport, the author clearly believes that if more women were involved in transport planning, transport policy would be more female friendly. This is very much like the belief that more women on boards would make them more effective and I've ranted on about that quite enough. The section on toilets must surely demonstrate that this assumption is flawed: I am sure that there are female architects involved in designing public buildings but there is always a queue for the ladies.
The accounts of the toilet problems of women in less developed countries were horrifying but Criado Perez is too young to know that the UK situation used to be much worse than now. Women used to have to pay a penny to use a public loo: men paid nothing. A wonderful Labour MP named Barbara Castle did more for women than many other female MPs ever had when she got that charge abolished.
I realised that I am not the target audience for this book. I'm not entirely sure who is but it may open up some useful conversations. Criado Perez' argument is important but we also need to recognise that there is some danger in expecting significant and fast change from increasing female representation.
Then I opened the June issue of economia. I always start with the disciplinary listings since someone observed that true equality in the profession would not be achieved until there were as many women being hauled up for disciplinary offences as there were men. On that basis we still have some way to go.
But look at this. Page 14. Strapline at the top of the page. "From the Institute this month: A woman steps up as ICAEW president..." Can you imagine reading "A man steps up as ICAEW president"? Maybe this just proves Criado Perez' point.
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