FOOTNOTES
HILARY JOFFE: Corporate SA starts to examine itself in the unflattering mirror of good governance
‘Questions are being asked within corporate SA itself about what a good board of directors needs to be and to do now’
One of the areas in which SA has lost ground in the World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness index is in the efficacy of its corporate boards, with SA’s ranking plunging from third to 34th since 2016. The World Economic Forum uses a mix of objective and subjective metrics to compile the index and its decision to bump up the size of its sample of executives in 2017 has tended to skew the results. But even if the precise numbers shouldn’t be taken too seriously, the trend is clear. Questions are being asked within corporate SA itself about what a good board of directors needs to be and to do now. In an environment in which politics and macroeconomics are crucial drivers of businesses’ fortunes, it’s no longer adequate for a company to have directors whose skills and focus are on the numbers and compliance issues and not on the external landscape.Nor are companies well served by directors who share similar networks and backgrounds and have only limited ability to connect to social...
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