"Wits University, in Johannesburg, invited student representation onto the University Board. Meetings that used to take four hours now take two days," says Judge Mervyn King, Chair of the Global Reporting Initiative and the King Commission on Corporate Governance.
"The student board members are meant to consider the best interests of the University but they were instructed, by students, to vote in specific ways on certain issues," continues King. In other words, student representatives, by not acting in the best interests of the university are not fulfilling their mandate as board-members. They are committing fraud.
Cape Town, over the past week, has hosted the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN) conference. 300 regulators, fund managers, private equity groups and lobbyists got together to discuss the difficulties of managing a modern company.
Mervyn King may not have invented the idea of non-financial corporate disclosure but he certainly helped formalise the debate. His original King Commission developed a methodology for what is known as the Triple Bottom Line, or – in the US – as Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) issues. This was picked up and formalised internationally as a voluntary set of reporting standards under the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and the Global Reporting Initiative. All called G3, for short.
With this number of heavy hitters behind it you'd think there'd be some uniformity about how to go about setting up a representative board. Far from it.
To try and make a complex issue less likely to make you rip off your own foot and beat yourself to death with it ...
"When do you think Zimbabwe will collapse?" asked Tama Muru, from the BBC's HARDtalk.
"It has already collapsed," said Whythawk.
Zimbabwe, for all the posturing by Robert Mugabe - their increasingly detached tyrant - is a fairly open economy. Their people are used to processed goods imported from outside the country and Zimbabwe has given up the pretence of producing very much for itself. North Korea it isn't.
Yet 80% of the working-age population, 4.5 million people, are unemployed. Inflation is estimated to be 11 000% Other countries in history that hit these types of levels collapsed in anarchy and civil war; when they didn't involve their neighbours as well.
A Whythawk Ratings analyst recently spent time in Zimbabwe and can offer insight on what prevents this instability.
When a financial services company recommends that you purchase a particular stock you need to be sure that their advice is based on impartial research. After Enron...
So many justifications for the new rules introduced to curb financial excess, to reign in "irrational exuberance", begin with the words, "After Enron." Financial directors have a heavy burden to bear. Executives must be more responsive to boards. Boards must be more responsive to shareholders.
Thank goodness executives can still buy good feelings and happy times by dispensing their shareholders' money on charitable works. It's hard for shareholders to complain because then they'll simply look selfish.
Philip Armstrong, board-member of the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN) and head of the World Bank Global Corporate Governance Forum, feels that this should change.
Many years of grizzled travelling will give you a cavalier attitude to roadside cuisine and a thick skin to the casual xenophobia which occasionally greets the weary traveller.
Most tourists have trouble-free experiences, meeting people grateful for their presence and aware that their daily bread (or chapatti) depends on it. But that isn't true everywhere.
Thomas Friedman coined the McDonald's Theory of Conflict Resolution to explain why he thought nations that shared a common fast-food culture wouldn't go to war. But then Friedman enjoys artery-clogging burgers while I enjoy independent travel.
Tourism is the largest employer and most valuable industry in the world. And so I present the Tourism Theory of Conflict Resolution, or – more simply – the Trouble with Paradise.
Striking civil servants have, today, agreed on a wage increase with their boss, the South African Government. The 7.5% was the final offer tabled last week by government and rejected by COSATU, the Congress of South African Trades Union, in favour of their revised offer of 9%.
The government originally offered 6% triggering the (now) one-month strike.
Consider this: for every day on strike, workers will have to work another 40 just to recover the money they lost. The 20 working days lost equates to three and a half years before they recover their one month of lost pay. Each day of the strike also meant that government hadn't paid workers and so was able to offer an equivalent increase without actually effecting their budgeted allowance.
So how much should workers have held out for to - at the very least - break even and leave themselves equal to the money they lost (but without an inflation-level increase)?
aloft: the whythawk blog 
