Mark Goyder discusses how changing trends in shareholder ownership will affect the decisions of executives and what this could mean for sustainable policies.  This article was published by Ethical Corporation in July. Mark Goyder is founder director of Tomorrow’s Company.  Mark holds a number of other positions, including British Airways Corporate Responsibility Board; BT Leadership Advisory Panel; Camelot Advisory Panel for Social Responsibility and Judge for Unipart group Mark in action awards. He was named Director of the month, June 2004, by Director Magazine and won the IMS Millenium award for best speaker.

The paper proposes a framework to help organizations monitor levels of trust for different stakeholder groups.  Part I, contained in a separate document, examined various trust indicators to measure the relative presence or absence of trust, and the nature of that trust, in typical commercial relationships.  It also introduced new trust concepts and proposed a novel framework for classifying conditions that indicate trust.  Part II builds on these foundations and examines trust indicators for investors.  Examples are used to demonstrate various ways the framework can be applied to measure trust indicators for investors with distinct needs.

This paper introduces the Trust Enablement™ approach to corporate governance, as a natural and harmonizing counterbalance to prevailing risk management practices.Recent attempts to restore confidence in capital markets have been based largely on risk management practices that place greater emphasis on protecting organizations from further erosion of trust than on establishing higher levels of trust and confidence. Efforts focused on proactively building trust yield better results than recent risk management reactions to mistrust.  A complementary, offensive trust and confidence-building strategy is therefore proposed as more effective for reducing director and officer liability exposures and enhancing business value than a prevailing defensive, risk management strategy.Comparative examples of current governance practices and proposed initiatives when mapped to the Trust Enablement™ model reveal a deficiency in trust and confidence-building governance mechanisms.  Trust Enablement™,...

This Tomorrow’s Company report seeks to understand the link between innovation and the effective management of risk. The price of poor governance has been increasingly evident through the credit crunch and recession. The report in particular considers the relationship between innovation and difference or 'diversity' on the board;  the effectiveness and role of non-executive directors, and the impact of the criteria of independence; the relationship between innovation and risk; and the impact of quality of leadership - 'the tone from the top'. 

Tomorrow’s Corporate Reporting: A critical system at risk focuses on the systems architecture and the behaviours and values of its stakeholders. Not on the content of the ‘ideal corporate report’. By corporate reporting we mean all the mechanisms by which companies communicate their performance and activity to their stakeholders, with a particular emphasis on the flow of information into the investment community.The study looked at:What aspects of the system are preventing or supporting the effective development of corporate reporting? And what changes are needed to make the system fit for purpose for the future? During the research, 145 individuals provided evidence, were interviewed or engaged through roundtable discussions, representing 118 organisations from 22 countries across five continents. The report explains the components of the current system and highlights that very few, if any, stakeholders see it as a system – rather they see particular pieces of the jigsaw. The...