Corporate Governance and Responsibility Forum – Day 2

Here are we are back to the Forum in Day 2. Multi-days forums usually show their effectiveness in following days, when the first impact of excitement is starting to wear-off. So, it is good to see that momentum remained in the second days in more heated discussions and debates to the benefit of all.

I would like to share a very interesting session we launched towards the end.

Conventional wisdom in such forums calls for pushing for concepts within these forums, so the sensible thing to do was to continue to rally for corporate governance and responsibility. BUT, we thought we wanted to challenge that. In the final session we brought two panels of experts on two sides:

1. PRO corporate governance and responsibility (makes sense!)
2. COUNTER corporate governance and responsibility (dangerous)

For some reason, I was chosen to be in the second panel and bring possible counter views on implementing governance and responsibility, which I personally thought to be fun!
So the first panel started by illustrating on the benefits that governance will bring to the region and attracting foreign investments and such, which was sort of clear after two days of workshops.

Comes our turn to “respectfully” disagree about the timing and the maturity of other systems in place before good governance and responsibility are to be in place.

I, along with my fellows, challenged that people rallying beyond governance may loose the bigger picture of the real motives behind it, which should be doing the right business and doing business right. The race towards rules and regulations may empty that good concept of its soul. I draw an analogy on the ISO certification that became the craze of the industry in the 90’s and factories were piling loads of paper trail just to show that their ISO.

My panel actually succeeded in coming up with strong arguments!

HOWEVER, towards the end we countered ourselves in saying that governance is not about just having the laws, regulations and procedures but about having the right thinking about what works and why it should work. Corporations have existed for a long time. The main mission of corporations has been and still will be to create value and wealth. In that process there has to be a balance in the environment between maintaining ethical and transparent conduct, and allowing freedom for operations.

In summary, everything we do or preach for has two sides. We need to see that and maintain an outlook at the bigger picture in our choices.

The Forum ended with a great enthusiasm and helped the attendees to exchange views and more importantly enjoy that in a relaxed atmosphere.

Until the next forum …