Best Practice In Corporate Governance – Not Just Conformance But Better Performance

Originally published in Hedge Funds Review, May 2007.

Corporate governance is not just about conformance – in fact it’s rather about performance and is an indicator of a strong and well-managed company.

Traditionally corporate governance has been viewed as simply burdensome bureaucracy – a set of procedures that distract from the core focus of maximising return and as such it has often been stuck at the foot of the priority list.

The corporate scandals in the early years of the twenty-first century such as Enron and Worldcom were rooted in a failure of corporate governance, raising concerns about the (poor) levels of corporate governance across the wider commercial landscape. This provided the catalyst for a refocusing of minds onto the application of better corporate governance practices.