Companies should expect that individual director
evaluation will often indicate needed personal
development programmes tailored for individual
directors. The best companies in the region already invest
in board development programmes, though they report
poor attendance levels at these programmes, and they are
rarely tailored to the needs of individual directors.
We consider there is great merit in designing personal
development programmes for individual directors, even
to the extent of providing one-to-one expert mentoring of
individual directors. This would be an important part of a
concerted effort to ‘raise the bar’ in terms of the minimum
competence and commitment needed from directors.
Individual director ‘buy-in’ to a tailored personal
development programme is likely to be higher than for a
programme targeted only at the company’s needs, but will
be beneficial for both.
In the region, rarely is the board evaluation 360°
with directors assessing the performance of their codirectors, and with senior management below the board
contributing to the board assessment process. To the
extent that shareholders participate in the evaluation, it is
usually only indirectly via the nominee directors, so that
the voices of other shareholders are not heard.
Audit
Professor Mackenzie, an eminent economist at
Manchester University UK, coined these immortal words
as far back as 1966 in his Foreword to a book on auditing
in governments by E.L. Normanton based on the latter’s
MPhil thesis which Mackenzie had supervised: 8
‘Without audit, no accountability; without accountability,
8
no control; and if there is no control, where is the seat of
power? ... … great issues often come to light only because of
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