Words .....that work

I have a guest from across that pond:  Mark Rogers, Founder/CEO of BoardProspects.com - a space you will want to watch closely in coming weeks.

Here's Mark, complete and unedited:

Chesapeake Energy Corp. (NYSE:CHK), appeared before its shareholders at its annual meeting this past week as a reincarnation of itself. After a year of responding to the fallout from the scandal involving unreported loans to former CEO and Chairman Aubrey McCl...

It is all now getting personal.

Some progress is being made in making it more difficult to absolve oneself of personal responsibility while doing an 'office job.' And it's about time - because you're expected to be personally responsible when you do other jobs, from driving a school bus (carefully and responsibly), to selling vegetables (fresh, clean, priced right), to working on a building site (so much room for disaster).

You are expected to be persona...

I have been thinking about the disconnect between the 'tone from the top' advice we keep hearing in the UK about boardrooms, the very 'top' of our companies - and the message being given (or not) by government at the top when it comes to the way its own business is conducted.

By that I mean the way women in politics - or those who aspire to it -

Too much to say and not enough time. That's good, I think - it means there are more things that I care about than the time at my disposal. A productive mix. 

First - next week the British Group Inter-Parliamentary Union (BGIPU) has kindly asked me to be part of a panel debate on violence v women in Politics (from a media perspective). The timing could not be better. Three women took on Facebook last week on misogyn...

The most interesting thing about the not-about-to-go-away row about plcs paying their corporate taxes isn't really about tax at all. It's about trust and reputation.

That became clear in the UK as we shifted through the companies in the spotlight on our front pages; Starbucks, Amazon, Google....and Apple. The first three were somehow big anonymous companies, even for the coffee aficionados out there - but Apple- well, Apple felt different.

It sudden...

Fighting for good corporate governance is hard enough without the use of words for obfuscation. At the very least, we should be clear about what we want to achieve in appointments to the boardroom. Sometimes - in the UK at least, we are very good at using words that confuse, rather than elucidate. 'City grandee' has become just such an epithet.

On May 16, the FT Lex column headline said:

It was  something of an eye opener  to attend the second meeting of the Natural Resources Forum (NRF) last week at the Royal Institute in London's Mayfair.

Talk about boardrooms that have their work cut out - and oh so much risk management to worry about. And then there's whatever China is up to- no one really seems to know - but China's behaviour around natural resources in Africa is causing an awful lot of insomnia.

The

Serendipity again. So I look it up. OED: "Origin 1754: coined by Horace Walpole, suggested by Three Princes of Serendip, the tile of a fairy tale in which the heroes were always making fortunate discoveries." 

Perfect. Because this blog - started as a platform from which to express my views and gain visbility - has managed to put me on that path of discovery, where people find me, and vice-versa and we're (mostly) 'the good guys', interested in governance and rea...

Today , February 24th, marks two years exactly since the release of the report by Lord Davies on the lack of women in the UK's plc boardrooms.  

There has been much discussion and open debate in that time and some progress has been made on the numbers of women non-executive directors. For a look at speed and progress to date, see my piece in the FT 'Women and the Workplace' special report  out last Thursday. It had to be limited to 1000 words, which concentrated th...

Is anyone in the UK's businesses listening and does anyone care ? Not much, apparently.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has a Quarterly Employee Outlook Survey just out which finds things are in a sorry state. 

It tabulates an 'employee ...