September 11, 2006

A world authority on corporate governance offers some guidelines to establishing codes of best practice.

Vertex Group and Mighty River Power director Samford (Sandy) L Maier Jr is no stranger to tough assignments. Dealing with the difficult is what makes him an effective and increasingly sought after director. Still his route to the boardroom, though perhaps inevitable, wasn’t meticulously charted.

It’s not just the size of the salary packet that counts but how it links to organisational performance – and Kiwi corporate heads lag their overseas counterparts on both measures, as Vicki Jayne explains.

Former South African Supreme Court judge, Mervyn King, is an internationally acknowledged expert on corporate governance. His views and experience are highly prized in his native South Africa, Europe, the United States and now New Zealand and Australia.

It’s a long way from a small North Island mill-town to the boardrooms of the country’s top companies and government organisations. But for former King Country girl, Alison Paterson, the journey was just one of the many firsts she’s achieved for New Zealand women. She was the first woman appointed to a public-listed company board when she accepted an invitation to join the Apple & Pear Marketing Board in 1976.

From high school dropout to professional director, it’s been a long and somewhat unconventional journey for Joan Withers, who now combines a bucolic rural lifestyle with her boardroom duties.

An Australian Supreme Court decision earlier this year, following the One.Tel collapse, appeared to extend the levels of care and responsibility required of chairmen. What does this mean for New Zealand boards?

Will prescriptive regulations kill good corporate governance?

New Zealand companies face a succession crisis but too few boards see building internal talent as a strategic issue – or as a problem they can and should address.

The Securities Commission report on Corporate Governance in New Zealand – Principles and Guidelines has, since its release in February, garnered its share of critics and champions. The report identified

Robert Monks says CEOs, not boards, hold all the power.

The corporate governance debate took wrong turning early in the piece and missed the most pressing corporate governance issue: how to address the under-performance of companies so that they are

Why directors wanting to win in the big league have to be situational schizophrenics.

Despite some two or more decades of research, we are little the wiser in determining whether or not there is some relationship between governance and the organisation’s performance.

How does performance appraisal fit logically within the overall strategic and operational intent of an organisation?

Audits are unavoidable for listed companies and overseas-controlled companies, but they can also add value to many family companies in ways that may not be obvious.

Jim Scott, former Air New Zealand chief executive and now chairman of his own rapidly growing investment company Aquiline Holdings, was looking for a model and inspiration on which to base the staging of his company’s annual general meetings. “They should be a time of celebration,” he says. So he took off for the best and reported back to The Director.

Our governance landscape is changing. The contours are being altered by an array of natural and evolutionary changes including, of course, the regulatory reshaping that has followed the storm of outrage caused by director abuse and incompetence particularly in the United States. The new face of tomorrow’s board is emerging. How different will it be?

The New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX) released its final version of the proposed changes to its Listing Rules on corporate governance in August. The proposal was the result of extensive

We have moved from the age of management to the “millennium of governance” but the evidence so far suggests individual compensation hasn’t kept pace with the dramatic shift in director responsibility. To establish just what is happening in the world of director remuneration, integrated human resources consultancy Sheffield and The Director are conducting an extensive survey of New Zealand director fees, practices and attitudes and making comparisons with the state of play in Australia.

This is a “lesson from the trenches”. Denis Orme draws on his experiences as a chief executive and a board member of both commercial enterprises in the public and private sector and not-for-profit groups in New Zealand and the United States to offer some advice on how to build a successful partnership between a board and its CEO.

Gary Judd Gary Judd QC is the new chairman of Ports of Auckland, succeeding Neville Darrow who retired at the end of June after six-year term as chairman. Judd is

John Palmer Palmer, chairman of Air New Zealand, has been appointed chairman of five-member panel that will assess the qualifications, capabilities and experience of candidates intending to stand for election

Rt Hon Jim Bolger The Rt Hon Jim Bolger, Prime Minister of New Zealand from October 1990 until December 1997, has been appointed to the main board of directors of

Philip King, Athol Mann, Jenni Norton New Zealand Opera has three new directors. They are Philip King, Athol Mann and Jenni Norton, and they replace outgoing directors John Morrison and

Helen Atkins Atkins, an Auckland-based partner of Phillips Fox who has specialised in environmental, resource management and local government law for more than 14 years, has been appointed to the

Bill Wilson Wellington-based QC Bill Wilson has been appointed chairman of Visa New Zealand. former partner in Bell Gully where he provided advice to the New Zealand Bankers’ Association, Wilson

When the Institute of Directors in New Zealand set about designing an accreditation programme for its members it scoured the world for examples of best practice. Several years, many submissions and several reviews later, we invited a panel of informed individuals to debate the relative merits of the newly launched director accreditation programme. Ruth Le Pla reports.

Corporate governance is the current hot topic for business. A series of well-publicised corporate failures in the United States, and closer to home with Australia’s HIH Insurance Limited, has ignited a flurry of activity, and inevitably led to the call for change.

What is the role of sustainability in good corporate governance? Professor Jan Bebbington, a world leader in the development of accounting for sustainable development, was in New Zealand earlier this year addressing business leaders on the way in which two business imperatives – sustainability and good governance – have begun to merge.

Plans to beef up governance in tertiary education institutions have run into some flak. What are the issues and how do they differ from those in the private sector?

Welcome back to the pages of The Director. Thanks to the supporting partnership of Sheffield and Simpson Grierson, the magazine both as component of Management and as stand-alone publication, is

What does being Maori mean when it comes to best practice corporate governance? After all, the rules of good governance – like honesty, integrity and accountability – are colour blind.

Poor decisionmaking at board level is driving the growth in corporate governance education programmes at tertiary institutes throughout the country. talked to universities and business schools for a comprehensive review of governance education.

Slowly but surely the boardroom is becoming a more diverse environment. And with the change in the composition of boards comes a different and more challenging people dynamic. But is this altering the quality of boardroom debate and decision making? Mark Story reports.

Welcome to the first edition of The Director. Sheffield has joined forces with business periodical publisher, Profile Publishing, and leading law firm, Simpson Grierson to establish The Director and provide

Intellectual property is a key element in business success, yet directors and their boards often give it limited attention, says Teresa Griffiths. What are the risks and rewards associated with IP and why should an organisation have an IP strategy at all?