I am sure you must have heard about Nike using Colin Kaepernick, the American footballer, in its new advertising campaign. In brief, Kaepernick’s refused to stand for the American anthem played prior to the start of the football match to protest police violence against African Americans. This earned him the ire of President Donald Trump,…
Category: People
How CEOs Subvert Boards
It is not often that the failure of a board of directors spills so openly into the public domain. But the ICICI board under the inept leadership of its Chairman, M.K. Sharma, has managed to make themselves the poster child for poor corporate governance in India. It has sullied the reputation of everyone associated with…
Being an Academic versus an Executive
Recently, I was invited by the Marketing Strategy Special Interest Group to deliver the keynote address at the European Marketing Academy Conference (EMAC). This annual conference brings together a thousand or so marketing professors from all over the world. My presentation was about the relevance of research done by business school professors for practicing managers….
Is the ICICI Governance Problem Systemic?
The blog post on ICICI governance, despite appearing previously on the Bloomberg Quint website, was rather popular (30,000 views) when reposted on LinkedIn. Readers really engaged with it by offering several comments on how to improve corporate governance – Thank you. In this post, I would like to share some of the comments with my…
ICICI Bank: The Corporate Governance Problem of India Continues
I have previously written about the particular agency problem for promoter-led companies: protecting minority shareholders. Promoters have considerable leeway to siphon corporate resources away from the minority shareholders via skewed contracts with related companies (e.g., tunnelling profits to firms where the promoter shareholding is larger) and undeserving pecuniary benefits for promoters (e.g., paying for marriage…
Do We Need Chief Strategy Officers?
The Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) is a curious position. Some companies have them, while in other companies, such a position does not exist. In the latter, when you enquire why there is no Chief Strategy Officer in the organization, the CEO will dismiss the idea that such a position would add any value. As one…
Five Lessons from 2017, with questions for 2018 and beyond
Let me start by wishing everyone Happy New Year! I was delighted at the traction that the blog has gained over the year. During 2017, I wrote thirty posts. The four most popular were:
Are Independent Directors Independent?
Thank you everyone for your support of last week’s blog “How Cyrus Mistry was Fired as Tata Chairman”. It received over a million views between my blog, social media, and websites of publications. Besides, it also appeared in the print editions of more than 30 national and regional newspapers. The separation of control from ownership…
How Cyrus Mistry was Fired as Tata Chairman
On 24 October 2016, Cyrus was in his Bombay House 4th floor office examining what seemed like a routine agenda for the Tata Sons board meeting that was scheduled to start in five minutes at 14:00 hours. Through the grapevine, Cyrus had heard that some of the board members had an unscheduled informal meeting earlier…
In India, nothing is too much trouble
One of the remarkable things that strikes visitors, especially foreigners, about India is the warmth of the people one encounters. Individuals think nothing about dropping everything and going out of their way to help you without any expectation of reciprocity. They even get embarrassed if you so much as thank them for their generosity.
Au Revoir 2016
Welcome to the last blog of 2016. Since this weekend blog was set up, I have written 38 posts, which are aimed to be consumed in about 10 minutes. It is now emailed to more than 750 subscribers. But via postings on http://www.scroll.in and http://www.linkedin.com, another 10,000 to 100,000 views a week are garnered. Signing…
The Interview That Never Ran
A primary function of PR agencies that are hired by companies is to feed journalists with stories / questions that will reflect poorly on the other side. Last week, I received one such set of gotcha questions from a senior journalist of one of India’s leading newspapers. For some reason, despite the tight deadline given…
Nirmalya Kumar 