Читать книгу High Performance Boards - Didier Cossin - Страница 20

Older companies tend to underperform. In order for a company to survive and actually thrive in the long term, it must apply the Darwinian principles of variation, selection, and replication. Just like in the natural world, the most successful firms evolve constantly to adapt to changing conditions, while those that fail to do so become extinct.

It is worth considering variation and replication in a governance context, because of the many different models around the world. In terms of ownership structure, for example, there are publicly traded companies; family owned, private-equity owned, and government-owned firms; non-profits, members' associations, and so on.

One interesting case is how the Communist Party of China governs the country's state-owned assets, and in particular its publicly listed state financial institutions, through the sovereign wealth fund CIC and its dedicated division, Huijin. CIC has developed governance practices that might be useful for large, complex organisations elsewhere. These include having full-time non-executive directors in parallel to Western-style independent directors, and strongly aligning perspectives in the governance of holding groups and subsidiaries. It might well be an inspiration in other parts of the world from a technical governance standpoint, and beyond the political dimension. For example, is it possible that large global financial institutions have become too complex to be governed by part-time independent directors mostly and would professional full-time board members make sense?

Yet the current global focus on excellence in governance has only been possible because of earlier success in other important areas: administration, management, and leadership. High-quality administration was developed and systematised as early as the eighteenth century by organisations such as the East India Company. Then quality management to ensure efficiency and better results was systematised in the first part of the twentieth century by business leaders such as Alfred Sloan and Henry Ford. Business schools were then established to educate leaders in management. The second part of the twentieth century saw the systematisation and theorisation of leadership – the ability to engage and energise people at a higher level – through theories developed in the 1970s.

Today, organisations need to go to the next level. Moving from A to B, and energising people towards achieving this result, requires organisations to develop the ability to choose the right objectives and make the right decisions. And this is the essence of governance. With public trust in corporations and leaders at an all-time low, quality governance will be one of the competitive advantages of the future.

At the same time, today's governance successes and failures stem from the reliance on leadership within organisations.