On 22nd November, John Ruggie, UN Special Representative on business & human rights, issued his draft “Guiding Principles for the Implementation of the UN ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ Framework”.

Tomorrow's Corporate Governance: improving the quality of boardroom conversations focuses on the importance of conversation in the boardroom as the ‘magic dust’ that underpins board effectiveness and considers ways in which boards strive to get the very best from the skills and abilities around the board table.  

John Drummond discusses what beliefs he thinks would drive a force for good company, arguing that that the beliefs of executives are often more important than the stated purpose of the companies that they work for.John Drummond is the Chief Executive of Corporate Culture, a communications and social marketing company that has been a finalist for small company of the year in the Business in the Community Awards for Excellence 2008 for the past two years.  He began life as a journalist before working for IBM in sales and marketing for seven years. He was formerly Group Communications Director of United Utilities.

Crises are normal and of all times: they are always generally unexpected, with the next one quite different from the previous one (as we have put the breaks and stress-tests in place to prevent the previous one from occurring again), and more difficult to contain, manage and resolve. What the current crisis has taught us is how interdependent the world has become;

Nature and Ethics by F. David Peat.Paper given  to Centromarca; Italy association of leading brand names."When, in the late 17th Century, bankers, merchants and shippers met in Edward Lloyd's Coffee House they carried out their transactions based on the principle of "my word is my bond". Indeed in English law a verbal agreement, sealed by a handshake, was legally binding, the written contract being only a memorandum of what had been agreed upon by both parties. This was the world analyzed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo in their theory of the market place. It was a market, as Ernesto Illy has often pointed out, based on three invisible pillars of Trust, Honesty and Respect, ethical principles that were taken for granted in that period".