Mandy snippet 2

Having just spotted this post on S&M, how about this?:

At the same time we need to accept that the current structure of most public companies is better at rewarding enterprise in senior management or owners than it is at giving the bulk of the workforce an incentive to innovate or commit to the business. The evidence is that companies that share rewards with their employees, like the John Lewis Partnership, are also very good at pursuing long term growth strategies.

From the same speech I linked to last night.

Pensions blame game

A couple of posts on the decline of decdent pension provision that are worth a look. Calvin here, and Matthew Taylor here.

I disagree with Matthew's argument that unions are in part to blame for the collapse of DB, because they weren't willing to negotiate a partial retreat (though in the comments he says he's taking his cue from the lack reform of public sector schemes). I think most union pensions bods actually despair that they were unable to do more to mitigate the dismantling of DB by private sector employers. In reality the unions (for various reasons) were unable to put up much organised resistance.

Calvin meanwhile takes aim at the ACA's argument that public policy is to blame for the decline:

the plethora of reasons why quality schemes have been closed in recent years stacks so high that to pick out failures of public policy seems, by itself, to be somewhat perverse: in my view, reasons why company schemes are closing are little to do with public policy and more to do with companies exploiting a period of worker weakness to erode a vital (and admittedly costly, at the moment) part of employees’ terms and conditions of employment based on short-termist considerations and fuelled by accounting standards that are unsympathetic to the long-term nature of pensions provision. The tide of scheme closures, in the face of DWP attempts to deregulate provision, seems evident proof that the policy ‘failures’ lie less at the public level than the corporate one.

Likewise, any attempt by employers to use auto-enrolment to reduce their investment in pensions at the individual level, on the grounds that quto-enrolment will increase overall costs, needs to be seen not as a failure of public policy but a function of the same attack by employers on terms and conditions.

Not surprisingly this is much closer to my view of the world. I would only add that the really big factor in all of this is life expectancy. It is the thing that has really pushed costs up and it is also the factor that is not being adequately dealt with (which is where I reconnect with Matthew's perspective).

The private sector has not addressed the issue of longevity. It has simply passed the buck back onto the individual, whilst at the same time reducing its commitment. Moving from DB to DC does not.... err... affect how long people live. But it does affect who carries the risk, and how much they pay for it. Inb effect then, as Calvin suggests, the removal of DB is not much more than a deferred pay cut, affecting millions who don't realise it. It's as simple as that. And the Right's campaign to destroy DB in the public sector is nothing more than an argument for massive levelling down.

Mandy asks interesting questions

Apparently there's been some kind of Labour-related story today... but the thing I want to focus on is a really interesting speech given by Mandy at the Work Foundation, which can be found here. There are various interesting bits in it, but this section right at the end is worth a look:

Finally, we need to start a debate about how we build a stronger culture of long term commitment to sustainable company growth in this country, based on a strong compact between institutional shareholders and the corporate sector.

On one hand we need a system that enables shareholders to discipline poor management. But we also need to give management some scope to plan and build without the excessive demands for quick returns that characterise too much modern public company ownership.

I don’t have any easy answers. Our reforms of company law made clear the importance of directors taking a long term view. At the same time we have empowered shareholders. We are now evaluating whether this has changed behaviour in the board room – and among investors.

Chris Hogg has played a key role in this debate with his review of corporate governance, and it is time for Britain to take a long hard look at the questions he and others have raised. I attach the highest importance to the new Investor Code and will be meeting investors and companies next week in the run up to the further consultation by the Financial Reporting Council.

Takeovers provide a very clear test here - for all involved. Companies making acquisitions should set out transparently and publicly their long term plans for the assets they propose to acquire, including company headquarters, R&D sites and main plants. Although these remain commercial decisions, firms or investors should expect to brave the court of public opinion if they are motivated only by short term profit.

Surely investment managers should be judged on their long term growth and profitability, not their short term performance – and the same goes for CEOs. How many strategic and effective managers are being hobbled with the quarterly race to please the beauty contest of the markets?

There's not much new here, as previous posts on 1990s reports by Marsh and Shiller show, but at the questions are the right ones (and as he acknowledges there are no easy answers). I think the idea of reviewing the impact of what the Government has done to date - particularly to try and empower shareholders - is exactly right. In my opinion most investors, including those that make a lot of noise about stewardship, haven't used the rights they have effectively for example to challenge remuneration. And it's great to see another minister say this kind of thing along with Myners.

It's just a shame that this has come way way too late. Even last year BIS had time to say review the impact of a shareholder vote on remuneration reports. Now there is no time left.

Bits & pieces

I'm still easing myself into 2010, so not much blogging for now. Here's some other people's stuff though:

The latest Member Trustee News (PDF) from the TUC

Insight Investment's RI library has reappeared (hat-tip: Aled)

A great post from Hopi on Cameron.

Some 2010 stuff

A couple of books that are about to appear in the UK that caught my eye.

The first is Drive by Dan Pink. Basically he appears to argue for a fairly fundamental reassessment of how we seek to motivate people. There's a WSJ interview here, and his website is here. It looks like it could either be really interesting or a lot of guff - the one-word title and the cover put me off a bit!

Obviously I'm interested in whether anyone in the remuneration field would ever take this kind of thing seriously. At a seminar last year I asked a well-known (infamous?) rem consultant who has a background in psychology whether the incentive schemes in place actually affected behaviour and got a fairly crap answer in response (something along the lines that some people are greedy). It was a strange response given that they had just stated - quite reasonably - that directors would usually do the right thing even if they could cash in by behaving poorly.

There's some emerging interest amongst a handful of investors in looking at some of these other ways of motivating people. Maybe now's the time to have a proper crack at this?

Second is Identity Economics by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton. Here's the blurb:

Identity economics is a new way to understand people's decisions--at work, at school, and at home. With it, we can better appreciate why incentives like stock options work or don't; why some schools succeed and others don't; why some cities and towns don't invest in their futures--and much, much more.
Identity Economics bridges a critical gap in the social sciences. It brings identity and norms to economics. People's notions of what is proper, and what is forbidden, and for whom, are fundamental to how hard they work, and how they learn, spend, and save. Thus people's identity--their conception of who they are, and of who they choose to be--may be the most important factor affecting their economic lives. And the limits placed by society on people's identity can also be crucial determinants of their economic well-being.

This makes some sense to me as there does appear to be evidence that how people see themselves has an impact on how well they perform. There's a bit in Predictably Irrational, for instance, where Ariely talks about the how Asian women performed differently in tests depending on whether they were encouraged beforehand to think of their identity in terms of either ethnicity or gender.

Two things

1. Nigel fisks a Sunday Times piece on public sector pay.

2. The dumbness of the Tories' Wisdom of Crowds rhetoric is rightly challenged.

Light at the end of the woods

Came across this metaphorical mix-up when Googling for polling stats:

“We’re not out of the woods yet, but at least we can see light at the end of the tunnel,” said a senior Labour official last week.

Needless to say it must be quite hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel if there's a wood in it.