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Governance isn't working? Examine your motives for saying so

Governance | James Thompson | 3 Mar 2010

Governance isn't working, current mechanisms are outdated, trustees are incapable of exercising adequate control. Salvation lies in paying trustees, management sitting on boards, self-regulation. Or so we are being told. Again.

Well, though I bear as many scars as the next (ex) chief executive when it comes to the arcane workings of trustees and boards, I just don’t buy it, neither the diagnosis nor the supposed cure.

For all its faults the current model of governance is far from broken. It provides a vital separation of powers, and offers a brake on the potential excesses of professional managers getting carried away with their own cleverness or enthusiasms. And while executives may currently run rings around their boards at times, it is not as easy a thing to do as some would make out, not when push comes to shove anyway, not indefinitely.

That, I think, is as it should be, and that, I suspect, is the reason the cry goes up to change things. Crying foul, the pro-change lobby aim to change the rules of the game to something more to their liking.

Looked at it in this light, I think the current model remains in remarkably good health, all things considered. I might even go so far as to suggest that the clunkiness and frustrations which provoke so much ire and complaint in some quarters are the very things which give the model its value and why it should be left well alone.

I could, perhaps, be persuaded otherwise about all this were it not for one thing, a kind of self-serving managerialist elitism which seems to run through much of what I read. What the pro-change lobby seems to be saying half the time – stripped of its rhetoric - is simply for charities to be run by a ‘better class of person’, people they can do business with, people who share the same views and values as themselves. This, they argue, will result in better oversight and monitoring of the executive.

Mmm…I wonder.

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