What’s your favourite part of being a non-executive director?

Now I’m going to take a wild guess here, that the least favourite part of a typical NED role is setting executive remuneration. To the media, and now even the government, it appears that NEDs love nothing more than awarding large pay increases, bonuses and pay-offs to executives. It often seems that investors share this perception, and believe that it is only institutional shareholder intervention that can restrain the irrational generosity of the average non-exec.

Meanwhile executives are usually demanding higher remuneration and showing the Remuneration Committee comparisons that reveal how underpaid they are.

There is no right answer as to how much to pay someone. The only ‘objective’ measure is to pay what you perceive is the ‘market rate’ for the role, or some fixed relationship to it (eg upper quartile or 10% above/below). This is the first stop of the remuneration consultants, who advise NED’s. However market rate setting causes inbuilt inflation. Many companies want to pay above the average, but few want to pay below average. The rest is mathematics.

Remuneration consultants will tell you that FTSE 250 benchmark is 150% of salary in annual bonus, and it’s difficult to argue down from that. Long-term bonuses are now generally signed off any way by large shareholders from the start.

Of course not all Remuneration Committees do a good job and some make bad judgements. Personally I agree that much executive pay, like that of a few other occupations, is too high, especially long-term incentives.

The question is what to do about it. The latest proposal from a Tory MP last week, and apparently backed by leading fund manager, Neil Woodford, is that large companies should form a committee of their five largest shareholders, with a worker representative and the company chairman invited as observers. This committee would approve pay deals, recommend appointment and removal of directors and question strategy.

Most non-execs would be only too delighted to delegate remuneration to someone else. The problem is that remuneration decisions are closely linked in to the detail of a company’s operation, career development or recruitment and retention. This means that the decisions need to taken with full knowledge of a number of complex and potentially price-sensitive issues.

Many larger fund managers currently delegate governance issues to a specialist corporate governance department. However these individuals inevitably lack the knowledge of the company and sector that the fund manager has. To have any chance of this working, institutional shareholders would have to send the fund managers, not corporate governance specialists, to these committees. My suspicion is that this would not be a welcome extra task for fund managers. Mr Woodford is already a busy man.

Institutional shareholders can already nominate, vote directors in and out. Do they really want to become the Nomination Committee, even without seeing how directors perform in board meetings?

Why would it take a committee of five large shareholders to challenge company strategy? In my experience most shareholder meetings talk strategy and there is plenty of opportunity for shareholders to express their views.

There are many smaller shareholders who would be worried about how this proposal would increase the power of a few large holders. Recent rule changes have strengthened protection for smaller shareholders from single dominant shareholders. Protection of minority shareholder’s interests is a key role for directors, which could be undermined by strengthening the power of the top five over director selection.

There isn’t an easy solution to setting executive pay. Remuneration has become a leviathan, taking up absurd amounts of board time, as directors try to balance executive aspirations with many different shareholder demands and compliance requirements.

I would welcome clearer guidelines from institutions as a whole on how they would like remuneration to be set. They would of course need to agree those guidelines amongst themselves first. Fund managers could engage more with non-exec directors, both to evaluate them and to communicate their wishes, and then to vote at AGMs for non-execs they trust.

If there were clear unitary guidelines, investors could vote out directors who don’t follow these rules. Shareholders don’t need to, don’t want to, and can’t, manage companies that they invest in. They should set the rules, and then judge the directors who do manage their companies.

This would build on our existing strong corporate governance framework, rather than bowing to media and political pressure by creating new parallel structures.

 

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New PM, but corporate governance is still a political punchbag

“I want to see changes in the way that big business is governed. The people who run big businesses are supposed to be accountable to outsiders, to non-executive directors who are supposed to ask the difficult questions, think about the long-term and defend the interests of shareholders.

“In practice, they are drawn from the same, narrow social and professional circles as the executive team and – as we have seen time and time again – the scrutiny they provide is just not good enough. So if I’m Prime Minister, we’re going to change that system and we’re going to have not just consumers represented on company boards, but employees as well.”

This speech was by Theresa May, not Jeremy Corbyn. It’s a topsy-turvy world. This is our new Conservative Prime Minister who is stooping to kick the corporate world – the dreaded ‘big business’ – as she strides into No10. Even madder, it was the Institute of Directors, not the Trades Union Congress, that welcomed her ideas. Let’s have a look at her charge sheet and her remedy.

“Non-executive directors… are drawn from the same, narrow social and professional circles, as the executive team”

It’s certainly true that non-executives are often serving, or more commonly former, executives. Normally that’s because running a company is a difficult, acquired skill, and so if non-executives are going to supply oversight, they too need to understand how companies are run. Pretty much all boards will have to have a chair of audit committee, who has to have a senior finance background. Similarly most will have a chair of remuneration committee who has experience of HR or corporate remuneration. Frankly, when it’s my money they are using, I want experienced non-execs looking after my interests.

“…time and time again – the scrutiny they (non-execs) provide is just not good enough.”

There are 3.5m active companies in the UK, of which 2,500 are listed on the stock exchange. How many companies have shown inadequate non-exec scrutiny? The banks perhaps in the financial crisis eight years ago? BHS? This was a private company through the recent scandal. Volkswagen in Germany perhaps?

We’ve seen many more scandals at the Home Office alone, let alone Parliament, in that time. Perhaps Mrs May could define ‘time and time again’?

“…we’re going to have not just consumers represented on company boards, but employees as well.”

When the Treasury Select Committee investigated Northern Rock’s failings, it highlighted a lack of banking qualifications on the board. It didn’t suggest that a consumer or worker on the board would have helped. Volkswagen does of course have worker representation, in line with the standard German model, of which presumably Mrs May is an admirer, although the Germans haven’t gone as far as a consumer director.

By the way, did she mean customer director, rather than consumer?

Where do we start?

Perhaps we can just ask Mrs May some simple questions;

1. Do you believe that if I invest my money in a company, then I should decide who manages it, or do you think that Government needs to decide it for me?
2. Do you believe that boards should be more diverse in composition than the Cabinet?
3. How many corporate scandals have been due to poor non-exec supervision?
4. What evidence have you got that worker and consumer directors would improve non-exec supervision?

Corporate governance is by no means perfect, and I, for one, would be delighted to hear new ideas to improve it. But this is the same old business bashing – ill thought-out and populist policy, backed by neither evidence nor analysis.

Le Roi est mort, vive la Reine.

Dodgy statistics and wild claims just patronise women

Grant Thornton has just published a Report comparing the effect on corporate return on assets (ROA) of having women on an executive board across three countries (UK, US and India). It concludes that such diverse boards cause companies to perform “Materially better”. The report quantifies the economic benefit from having more women executives on boards as “a staggering $655 billion”, boosting GDP by 3%.

Now that’s some benefit just from changing the sex of one board member per company. It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, of course, it is. Grant Thornton seems not to have published the full workings behind this claim, but let’s examine what it has disclosed;

1. The sample size is tiny. It is able to use just 127 of the over 1,000 companies in the top echelons of the three countries to make this dramatic conclusion. The report makes no mention of how the results could be random variation in a small sample size.
2. It’s a static analysis that compares companies currently with a female executive board director to those without. However, this statistic does not tell you the effect of a company deciding to appoint an extra female (ie a dynamic analysis). The analysis should have tracked the change in performance of companies that did this, in order to conclude that putting more women on boards boosts performance.
3. The analysis is not comparing all male boards with mixed ones. All but 60 of the over 1,000 boards already have female non-executive directors. There is no gradation reflecting how many females are on each board.
4. It assumes that correlation equals causation. It may well be that higher performing companies are simply better at attracting high performing female executives. Given the pressure on boards to have more females, and the resulting increased demand for female directors, then it would be logical for women to be able to choose to work for more successful companies.
5. The report extrapolates the average ROA from just 127 companies to over 1,000. However, if female executives are a source of competitive advantage, then this would of course be nullified if every company had such an advantage.
6. Somehow, the extrapolated 1,000 companies gain is then turned into 3% GDP growth, worth $655bn. Even if those companies did increase their returns, the report does not explain how they have calculated such a boost to GDP. For example; higher dividends might be remitted abroad; smaller companies would be likely to suffer increased competition from the 1,000; employees might demand a greater share of the profitability; and so on.

So adding 923 female executives would create an extra $655bn in growth. That’s over $700m per female director per year! Maybe they should ask for a pay rise.

More diverse boards may well make more effective teams. We do need more talented women in senior management. But it is very patronising to women to have to argue for this using dodgy statistics and ridiculous economic claims.

Maybe Grant Thornton published this report just as a publicity gimmick. But business is crying out for regulation that is based on real evidence, not political expediency nor ridiculous statistics.

Why do we have corporate governance regulation?

What drives corporate governance regulation? Is it media focus, political pressure, or a need to ’do something’?

Or is it sound analysis leading to thoughtful prescriptions? I suspect that pretty much everyone accepts that the answer is somewhere in the former list. Why does it have to be like this?

Evidence-based medicine is a well-established movement in health care. Even the UK Government published a White Paper in 1999 (“Modernising Government”), admitting that it “must produce policies that really deal with problems, that are forward-looking and shaped by evidence rather than a response to short-term pressures; that tackle causes not symptoms”. Sadly this went the way of many well-meaning political initiatives.

The UK Corporate Governance Code starts;’The purpose of corporate governance is to facilitate effective, entrepreneurial and prudent management that can deliver the long-term success of the company.’ Fine words, but how do we know that actually does this?

Corporate Governance regulators have not as yet woken up to the needs of evidence, analysis and proof. There was an outcry about executive pay. They reacted by asking the great and the good as to what should be disclosed, and then mandating it. The result is 30 pages at least in every annual report listing every last detail of directors’ remuneration. Where is the evidence that this has remedied the problem of excessive pay and payment for failure? I can see that investor interest and therefore pressure on boards has had an effect on boards, but such pressure was in fact the driver, not the result, of additional regulation.

Listed company directors now have to put themselves up for re-election every year now. This was because people thought it would be a good idea. Where is the evidence that this would help and where is the post implementation review that shows it was effective in what it set out to do?

Politicians and the media are baying for more diversity on boards. The regulators duly oblige by setting targets for more females. This time there are also claims of a statistical relationship between number of females on boards and good performance. Except that the statistics in fact are pretty dodgy, and fail to show a company performance improving over time as a result of the presence of more women (if you think about it, such a relationship would be quite extraordinary given the complexity of company profitability). Where is the post implementation analysis that shows company profitability in the UK has improved as the percentage of FTSE100 female directors has doubled? I’m not saying that there isn’t a moral or political case for female representation. If regulation is just political, then let’s not dress it up as rules for improved performance.

Would it be so hard to develop evidence-based regulation? This is what it should look like:

• The original events that led to the ’need for regulation’ are thoroughly analysed, and their causes identified;
• The theory is tested as to why the regulation will be effective against those causes, and what the possible impacts of the regulation might be;
• The counterfactual is tested: what would be likely to occur if the policy were not implemented;
• The impact of the new regulation is measured;
• Both the direct and indirect effects of the regulation are identified;
• The uncertainties and other influences outside of the regulation that might have an effect on the outcome are identified;
• The analysis and tests is capable of being tested and replicated by a third party.
• The regulation is tested to identify if it ever becomes unnecessary or develops unforeseen consequences.

This is a manifesto for good regulation. None of the current corporate governance rules would satisfy this standard. Yet, given the costs of implementing the governance rules, is it unreasonable for regulators to justify themselves with a bit of evidence?

Put simply, governance regulation should start with an analysis of what has gone wrong in companies, identify regulation to stop this recurring elsewhere, and then check that this is being successful. The analysis into what goes wrong at companies must be far-reaching and insightful, going beyond condemning individual directors and failures of risk management. It needs to look at culture and accept human fallibility.

We all need rules, but the regulators are perpetuating a lie in suggesting that rules improve performance. Football teams couldn ’t play a match without a common set of rules. But you won’t improve Manchester United’s performance by adding new rules to the game. Teams improve with better tactics, advice, and encouragement. Boards are teams too.

This would be the regulators’ toughest challenge. How can they go beyond rules and compulsion, to encouragement, best practice and helping boards? They need to accept the discipline of evidence, the limitations of rules, and open their eyes to the importance of culture and how to foster the right one. And that probably requires culture change at the Regulators themselves.