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 now firmly established in the marketplace. The enthusiastic response to the first issue has us planning more regular publishing programme for next year. There is so much going on in the world of corporate governance that we need to respond to the demand for more information, dialogue, debate, opinion and research. As managing director of Sheffield Ian Taylor said, “we see the provision of material that will help directors keep abreast of, understand and discuss governance issues as natural extension” of his company’s services to assist boards with best practice governance.
Our cover story this month takes look at the changing face and composition of boards. number of factors are contributing to the change including regulatory, demographic, competitive, stakeholder and some political pressures. Boards are evolving to meet the challenges presented by globalisation, stricter reporting standards, and greater transparency and public scrutiny. Directors are emerging as an important, assertive and responsible group that pro-actively works with management to deliver the best long-term results for the organisation. The boardroom is where the buck stops when things go awry.
We also talk to one of New Zealand’s most outstanding directors, Alison Paterson, about her boardroom career and what she thinks makes good director. High on her list of “must haves” for directors is intellectual horsepower, strategic vision, solid grasp of underlying risks and sound knowledge of what is required to build shareholder value. She is also watching, with interest, moves to invite more women on to the boards of the nation’s largest organisations. It is move she openly encourages. “The different perspective women can bring to the boardroom stems from their intuitiveness with people-related issues,” she says.
World authority on corporate governance, Mervyn King, offers some guidelines for establishing corporate governance code of best practice. As he says, financial markets are created or destroyed by international institutional investors. These institutions make their decisions to invest based on quality information coming out of company. “The only way of ensuring that there is quality information coming out of the company is for the institution to test the quality of the governance of the company,” he warns on page six.
The Director is published with the sponsorship support of Sheffield Ltd and Simpson Grierson. Ian Taylor, managing director of Sheffield, and Robert Fisher, chairman, Simpson Grierson.
