Our contribution, "Chapter 4: Corporate Governance Best Practices" of the book "Corporate Governance: A Synthesis of Theory, Research, and Practice", is being published by John Wiley & Sons on October 11, 2010.

ABSTRACT: This chapter introduces the concept of aspirational corporate governance (ACG), a context and formal framework that boards might employ to guide corporate governance improvements for any organization, regardless of its business objectives - for profit or for mission; control structure - closely or widely-held; or legal context - a corporation is property or a legal person. The ACG framework can be used to diagnose and design corporate governance principles, systems, and practices appropriate for the complexities of sustaining a self-regulating governance structure. ACG allows organizations to adapt through innovation to create new possibilities for delivering value in a complex, uncertain world. Join the authors' community.

TEResearch

Do board directors receive sufficient support?

We are conducting an anonymous survey of corporate directors to assess the market opportunity for providing enhanced support services to board directors.

Board directors who participates in the survey will have a unique opportunity to learn about peers' experiences and gain valuable insights about how to improve the effectiveness of their own board(s).

For more details and to participate in the survey, please visit http://www.SurveyMonkey.com/s/DirectorSupport

Interim results published by CorpGov.net.

Alliance Governance:
Balancing Trust and Control in Dealing with Risk

Every alliance requires that at the outset there are ways and means to establish sufficient trust for the parties to share information fully and to make timely decisions regarding joint investments and activities. Additionally, there are always times during the life cycle of an alliance when trust is challenged (key people change, surprises happen, partners become complacent and let communications lapse, etc.). So how do alliance managers develop and preserve a sufficient level of trust and deal with situations where trust erodes and needs to be shored up again?

When designing an alliance governance structure, managers have to choose between approaches based on control or on trust. This presentations proposes a framework to help managers decide which of the two is appropriate in a particular situation. Are control and trust substitutes or complements? What is the link between control, trust and risk? Our approach proposes that whether control and trust are substitutes or complements depends on the level and type of risk an alliance faces. In high risk situations companies use complex combinations of control and trust in a complementary way.

Watch the video recording of the session.

Feedback:

• 91% Strongly Agree "the topic was of great interest"
• 91% Strongly Agree "the speaker was knowledgable on the topic"

Comments:

• "Excellent content + speaker"
• "Excellent"
• "Cornerstone to a productive partnership. Help tools to evaluate + grow partnerships"
• "Much more meaningful than I anticipated. Well done"
• "Excellent Session - Thank you"
• "Great interaction with audience - too much material for time available to present - too bad, as content was excellent"
• "Very informative, interesting, interactive & great speaker"
• "Trust is an often overlooked and essential component of alliances. The presentation provided academic rigor to what most only understand intuitively. Very interesting"
  

The presentation unifies business value creation and preservation objectives within one framework suitable for use by, and accessible to, all departments of all organizations in all industry sectors. GRC still focuses too much on preserving trust and social capital and not enough on developing them. The entire premise of OCEG's GRC initiative is too narrowly focused and is therefore incomplete. To use a sports analogy, you can't win a football game with defense alone. Offensive business practices develop trust and build social capital, encourage risk taking, facilitate collaboration, and stimulate innovation. These elements remain inadequately addressed by the GRC approach to achieving its Principled Performance objectives.

Results: Stakeholder Trust Poll of LinkedIn Users

More than 100 LinkedIn users responded to our poll that asked "What should business leaders do to improve stakeholder trust?" by selecting one of five possible answers: Nothing; Manage risks better; Improve conditions for trust; Both of the above; or Other things. The results surprised us. For details, read our blog posting.

Confidence & The Cloud
Presented at Toronto Cobit User Group

COBIT stands for Control OBjectives for Information and related Technology. The thesis of our presentation was that control of computer clouds is difficult, if not impossible. Instead, Confidence should be the overriding objective, and IT managers should seek rich conditions for trust. (see all panel presentations)

Trust: “Yes You Can”

Guest Alex Todd's findings, models and work show that trust can be maintained and grown in the face of mistrust, and those who believe that only by taking from others will they succeed. He treats business people as responsible adults, not children, and his tools are a key part of starting to overcome the sociopathy affecting many established organizations today. (also available on Bruce Stewart's web site)

The Greatest Victim of Current Crisis is Trust

"Toronto, January 13 — Trust is the greatest casualty of the recent debacle in financial systems according to The Conference Board of Canada. The Board will host a Leaders’ Forum on Stakeholder Trust to argue for the need to seriously discuss the issue of rebuilding trust in Canadian Institutions on January 15 in Toronto. "

We contributed to the Conference Board of Canada's research on Stakeholder Trust by participating in several executive roundtable discussions and presenting two papers:

• "Part I: Trust Measures and Indicators for Customers" and
• "Part II: Trust Measures and Indicators for Investors"

Conference Board of Canada's Reports on Stakeholder Trust

The Trust Imperative: Taking Governance to the Next Level
November 2008, Source: The Conference Board of Canada, 28 pages

Boards’ oversight of stakeholder trust is an opportunity to contribute to success at a time when, more than even before, trust drives organizational value. This publication provides a set of practical guidelines that boards can use to probe and assess trust among five key stakeholder groups.



Stakeholder Trust: A Competitive Strategy
November 2008, Source: The Conference Board of Canada, 46 pages

Stakeholder trust can be a significant competitive advantage for organizations. Trust leads stakeholders to invest in the success of firms. This report examines the key features influencing trust among five key stakeholder groups—the public, investors, employees, customers, and suppliers.

Stakeholder Trust: A Compendium of Discussion Papers
Compendium by The Conference Board of Canada
November 2008, Source: The Conference Board of Canada, 54 pages

This compendium brings together the papers used to launch discussions at The Conference Board of Canada/Deloitte roundtables on stakeholder trust. They offer important insights about trust drivers and considerations for key stakeholder groups.

The Compendium contains an abstract of our papers "Trust Measures and Indicators for Customers & Investors" listed above.

The theme of this year's SCL Conference was "Creating a Resilient Supply Chain". Our presentation topic was "Trust Enabled™ Supply Networks: Enabling trust for collaboration, innovation and sustainability" (download presentation with speaker notes). Much of the material in the presention is based on our white paper ”Trust Enabled Supply Networks: Uncovering the trust-building secrets of highly collaborative supply chains”.

We posted our point of view about Microsoft's recent End to End Trust initiative on Microsoft's End to End Trust community form. Here is an excerpt:

"... End to End Trust needs to be founded on a comprehensive framework that addresses two overriding trust objectives: 1) Developing Trust; and 2) Protecting Trust. From what I have read so far, most of the discussion appears to focus on the latter."

Alex Todd is Industry Chair for the 9th World Congress on the Management of eBusiness (WCMeB 2008) being hosted jointly by the Carleton Research Centre for Technology Management (RCTM) and the McMaster eBusiness Research Centre (MeRC). The Congress will be held in Ottawa at the Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, October 5-8, 2008. This year's theme is "Collaboration 2.0 – Honing the Collaborative Minds of Leaders in the New Enterprise".

Our Presentation at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Toronto: "Measuring Awareness, Brand and Competitive Standing - Using Trust Indicators".

Our presentation to the Ponemon Institute's RIM Council: "Trust Measures & Indicators".

In Brand-Monitoring Solutions We Trust by By Jeff Zabin, CRM Buyer

"Trust is a strange animal in the world of business. Its inputs and outputs are ambiguous. It can't be codified. Like other intangible assets, it appears nowhere on the balance sheet.

The degree to which one company declares its reliance on the integrity and character of another company remains purely judgment-based and therefore subject to the foibles of human error -- although some folks, including those at Trust Enablement Strategies, a firm that provides an analytic framework for assessing the level of trust that exists (or needs to exist) between two parties, may beg to differ."

Our position: Judgments are formed based on perceiving one or more trust indicators. Our Trust Enablement® analytical framework identifies and classifies trust indicators according to how they affect trust perceptions.

Alex Todd's question to the Globe & Mail's Janet McFarland and her response about "Board Games 2007" are posted in the transcript of a live online chat:

Question: "...is the Globe planning to further evolve its Board Games scoring methodology to reflect differences in the appropriateness of various corporate governance styles for different kinds of companies pursuing distinct strategic performance priorities?"

Answer: "...I don't foresee us making dramatic changes to our methodology to take into account the wide variety of different corporate styles or strategies out there...."

Charles H. Green, trust expert, author of Trust-Based Selling, and co-author of The Trusted Advisor, recommends our we web site in his blog:

"Todd’s site is worth visiting if you want to delve into measurement and management issues, or if you simply want to stretch your mind about the issues of trust in business.

He also has the best collection of trust-related quotes I’ve seen."

Trust Enabling Strategies presented two papers to the Conference Board of Canada's Expert Roundtable on Trust Measures and Indicators. This was a continuation of the 2006 Deloitte-sponsored study on "Rebuilding Trust in Canadian Organizations". It looked at indicators of trust from employees, investors, customers and the general public.

Papers addressed the following questions:

1. What are the key indicators that directors and managers should look at to determine whether and to what extent a given group of stakeholders has trust in the company?
2. Why are these indicators the most important ones to assess?
3. How can companies track those indicators?
   

We contributed thought pieces for measuring customer and investor trust:

• "Part I: Trust Measures and Indicators for Customers" and
• "Part II: Trust Measures and Indicators for Investors"

Our article "Creating Trust in Government" has been selected one of the 10 best blog posts on trust for the July issue of Trusted Advisor Associates' "Carnival of Trust" blog posting.

Our article "Corporate Governance Best Practices: One size does not fit all" has been published in the Summer 2007 issue of the Corporate Governance Quarterly, a publication of the International Corporate Secretaries Association (ICSA) and Canadian Society of Corporate Secretaries (CSCS). James Gould, Chair, Editorial Committee, introduced the article in his editorial with "Alex Todd reports on some research on the connection between corporate governance and the corporate lifecycle. It's always easy to think that there is one answer to every situation when in fact we have to adapt our governance approach to the company's circumstances. As an aside, it turns out that there is a link between good corporate governance and profitability. No surprise there."

Alex Todd's published comments and question to the Globe & Mail about their series "Board Games 2006" regarding:

• The story "New disclosure rules to reflect evolving world"
• The story "Directors' share ownership plans"
• Q&A on Live Board Games discussion with Globe & Mail's Janet McFarland

Alex Todd's article: "Corporate Governance Best Practices: One size does not fit all". The article was published in Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) Canadian newsletter Corporate Governance Review (CGR). It was also posted in the Members in Action section of the Canadian Association of Management Consultants (CAMC) web site.

Alex Todd presented his paper "Trust Enabled™ Corporate Governance" (view MS Word version) to the Doctoral Consortium at the 2006 McMaster World Congress on Corporate Governance. Click on doctoral or general for related presentations.

Alex Todd was recently interviewed by Michael Hepworth, President of The Results Exchange about ”Trust The Most Important Marketing Ingredient”.

Alex Todd presented his groundbreaking new white paper ”Trust Enabled Supply Networks: Uncovering the trust-building secrets of highly collaborative supply chains” at the Innovative Collaboration for Competitive Advantage Third Annual Symposium on Supply Chain Management.