Tomorrow’s Company is now creating a forum which will, among other things, be examining these questions...

Denial is in the air. First a leading figure in motors sport brands Flavio Briatore’s  life ban as “excessive”. Then the director of the CBI’s UK Contractors' Group says that the OFT’s fines for construction companies are “perverse and excessive” on the grounds that “cover pricing was endemic” and others were doing it.

Look at any well-run private or family business. You find a close alignment between the owners of its shares and the board and the senior people running the business.

 

There are vigorous conversations going on in which the owners challenge the managers about past decisions and future directions.

 

Views differ, but there is a shared commitment to the long term success of enterprise. In these companies accountability works and so do incentives...

The Conference on the future of the corporation opened with a brilliant account of the causes of the crisis from economist Robert Johnson.

It’s worth recounting - see below - because of where it leaves us in our search for solutions. Johnson is a distinguished economist and his key insight, rather like Steve Lydenberg in his paper for the conference (which is accessible on this link) is that we have allowed clever technicians and their theories to lull us into a false sense of security that has disabled us from exercising due prudence.

 

But – and her is the key thing for tomorrow’s Company – people like Johnson do not have the answer at the micro level. They end up saying that we need better corporate governance. Which is where my own contribution came in later in the morning. The macro-economists need some micro-thinking about the change we need at the level of individual firms!

Hence the interest in the stewardship agenda, and my paper on this theme that is now available here