“Governance” and “interesting” used to be contradictory terms for most IR people. However, I went to a private lunch hosted by Tomorrows Company and Radley Yeldar which managed to combine both.

The point of the event was to allow a high quality group to debate the ‘stewardship’ of companies, and a potential disconnect of interests between ownership and the long term success of the company.

Tomorrows Company had produced an interesting perspective which graded degrees of stewardship, from the original founders of businesses with the highest degree of stewardship instincts, to speculators – members of the ‘casino’ economy, rather than the real one, with the lowest. The use of derivatives by these speculators to leverage investment without transparency has been an important contributor to this disconnect.