Roundup: Boards, directors, and women

As we continue with our efforts (albeit rather recently begun, in the US) to find the right balance for shareholder/board/management relations, the HP board debacle continues to dominate the discussion, serving as a purpoted demonstration of one position or the other. Consider the following items from the news this past week:

Stumbling toward a governance model. As news of Ms. Dunn’s demotion to regular director from the chair (of the HP board of directors) circulated this week, many have attempted to interpret the meaning for the struggle for the soul of today’s corporate boards. Are we witnessing the consequences of the arrogance - if not the arrogation - of power, or the punishment of an effort to do a good deed? Does the elevation of the current CEO to double-hat in the position of board chair represent a healthy streamlining of the corporate chain of command, or a derailing of the confused but earnest struggle to find an effective and efficient model for the interaction of boards and management? Ms. Dunn’s actions, and the events following on them, are at the heart of this public discussion. Click here to see a concise and articulate of depiction of why, from this week’s The Economist.
Is anyone listening? As we consider the controversies and mini-dramas that roil corporate America (and Europe), we can be forgiven for thinking there is a special class of people who alone decide, and rather incompetently so, matters of the utmost importance to our daily abilities to maintain ourselves, as well as to plan and safeguard our futures. The disputes between and among directors and senior managers can seem like feudal contests for power among the lords in their manors, sometimes settled in the lists, but never with recourse to the insights or interests of the villagers who look on, bemused at the relation between their influence over these events (none) and their vulnerability to the consequences (immediate and dramatic). Shareholders in today’s corporations can often feel the same way, as they struggle in vain to gain real control, or at least a meaningful voice, in the organizations that they, after all, own. See this piece, brief but to the point, and even colorful, in today’s Wall Street Journal by two corporate governance specialists.
The glass ceiling: why? There is argument today as to whether there still is a glass ceiling, and if so what causes it. But one British social psychologist with a degree from the London School of Economics has no doubt, insisting that it does indeed exist. Is it because of simple gender discrimination, as so often argued, or the lack of opportunity? Perhaps it is due to social/biological role determination, such as the absence from the workplace of so many women to bear and raise children? No, says this researcher, it is simpler than all that: it is because women are less intelligent than men. Assessing factors of intelligence, which are not clearly enumerated in the article (from the Daily Mail), he has concluded that male teenagers have IQ scores that average almost 4 points higher than their female counterparts. Perhaps, he suggests, this is the inevitable result of males having larger brains, and producing more chess grandmasters and geniuses. Perhaps, but how many organizations are run by either? In particular, please do spare us from the geniuses. Intelligence cannot be defined solely by the characteristics that cause so many to be so narrow-minded and to author the disasters that we have seen so many of them so reliably give birth and nurturance to. We can only hope not only that women will break through the glass ceiling, but that men of such weighty conceit will fall through it, removing it as a barrier to people, male and female, of greater wisdom and maturity.

That’s it for now. See you next week.

—

Please subscribe by email or RSS reader, so you won’t miss out on future posts - and thanks!

One Trackback/Pingback

The unfortunate effect of intelligence on managerial ability | Managing Leadership on Tuesday, July 10, 2007 at 11:26 am

[...] Indeed, that nonsense begins with the suggestion that we need individual leaders at all. What we need is managers. And more specifically, as we have noted here before, please do save us from the geniuses. [...]