By Rob Worthington-Smith
30 April, 2018
Writing in the Business Day, 30 April, 2018, Patrice Rassou reflects on the decline of leadership morality in the private sector. Examples given include:
- Grand larceny by Steinhoff CEO
- Resilient
- Tiger Brands
- Imperial
Usually, alignment between leader and broader stakeholders is solved by having sufficient “skin in the game.” According to former British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks, transparency and accountability underpin moral foundations.
However, the VBS Bank scandal has exposed the auditing profession, with examples now being found worldwide:
- CEO of Australian financial services giant AMP resigned after the company overcharged customers and misled regulators
- Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP exposed by a whistle-blower for having misused company funds
- Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe threatened by a scandal over the sale of public land to a school connected to his wife
- A $2bn fraud at India’s state-owned Punjab National Bank
What about independent non-executive directors? Maybe not, considering Mervyn King himself has declared “negligent oversight by a director is not a crime.”
Rassou closes with advice from Jeff Bezos: bring someone new to a team with high standards and they will adapt. But if low standards prevail, they too will quickly spread.
For the full article, see: https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2018-04-30-wanted–leaders-who-keep-their-fingers-clean-and–hands-dirty/
The FarSight Model of Leadership Maturity
From our research into decades of corporate reporting, and noting the significant difference between how mature leaders report against these five actions compared to immature leaders, FarSight developed a model for assessing leadership maturity in terms of how well companies respond to their most material issues. Every two months we analyse a sector of around eight companies on the JSE and submit our findings to the asset management industry through our channel partner, Legae Securuties, the first B-BBEE Certified Stock Broking firm in South Africa. Summaries of these findings, and how the model works, can be found at www.FarSightFirms.com
* Rob Worthington-Smith is the founder of FarSightFirms.com. The FarSight model analyses leadership maturity based on the IIRC’s Integrated Reporting Framework, an international standard designed to guide companies towards better reporting of their value creation story. In the SA asset management market, FarSight has an exclusive working partnership with Legae Securities.