Tag Archives: competence

Packing Heat At The House Natural Resources Committee

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Yesterday’s organizational meeting of the House Committee on Natural Resources was sidetracked, or hijacked, by a debate over whether members should be permitted to carry firearms into committee meetings.

An amendment introduced by Rep. Jared Huffman (D- California) met with strong Republican opposition. Arguments revisited the political violence of January 6th, raised questions about the mental competence of certain members, and pointed up the lack of vetting exposed by the George Santos debacle.

The Huffman amendment failed. Here are highlights of the discussion.

The Breach at Mount Polley Represents a Failure of Governance

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The Imperial Metals Corporation’s Board of Directors claims “ultimate responsibility” for the company and its business operations, but we have yet to learn exactly how the Board will exercise responsibility after the Mount Polley disaster. It’s not even clear the Board is capable of responding to the spill with anything but the public displays of emotion and concern we’ve already seen, weak assurances that the disaster has been “stabilized” and vague promises to do better next time. None of that amounts to taking responsibility.

Deregulation, lax regulation and staffing cutbacks on the government side are being blamed for the breach of the tailings pond. There are charges of collusion: “The government isn’t inspecting the mines, and the mining companies know it,” says consultant and advocate Glenda Ferris. But the breach at Mount Polley also represents a failure of internal or corporate governance at Imperial Metals: the board does not appear qualified to deal with the risks the mining company’s operations actually entail.

The Mount Polley breach has shown just how big those risks are, and how extensive are the responsibilities they carry. Imperial’s operations have created an environmental catastrophe (in the words of Phil Owens, Professor at University of Northern British Columbia). The last assessment I saw reported that Imperial Metals has released over 10 million cubic meters of water and 4.5 million cubic meters of toxic waste into surrounding rivers and waterways. The sudden rush of toxic waters was so powerful it took down trees in its wake.

There are important human rights considerations here as well, now that Imperial has compromised access to clean water throughout the region for who knows how long. Reassurances from Imperial Metals president Brian Kynoch that the water “in our tailings” is “very close to drinking water quality” are an insult to the intelligence, and make a mockery of serious human rights claims.

It’s not a question whether the mining company is a “bad actor,” or whether it’s “unfair” to portray them that way, as British Columbia energy minister Bill Bennett complained earlier today. It‘s a question of competence: who’s seated at the boardroom table before anything like this happens, and whether they are able to meet the serious responsibilities that go along with running a mining operation.

No one on the Imperials Metal board has environmental or human rights credentials. The company’s sulfide mining operations — and those of any mining company — require people with both. They should have a boardroom seat as well as a real say in how business gets done and how to mitigate mining’s risks. Until then, talking about “ultimate responsibility” is just guff.

 

Has Management Become Significantly More Incompetent?

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I don’t really have a dog in the Lepore-Christensen fight. Lepore’s strongest point, that Christensen’s theory of “disruption” is both a flawed theory of history and itself an artifact of history, seems to have gotten lost in the fray. Lepore overreached in her New Yorker piece, and now Christensen’s adherents and acolytes have come out in full force. There hasn’t been much room for careful discussion of Christensen’s theory as a discourse or artifact of post-industrial social collapse — which is, I suppose, what interests me most about it.

Still, I’m following the controversy, and yesterday, John Hagel offered a welcome, level-headed contribution to the discussion. Here, I simply want to paraphrase the comment I left on his post, because it touches on some themes I’ve written about in connection with the rise of the CEO (notably here, here and here.)

Hagel wants to move the discussion of Lepore-Christensen away from intramural antagonism and the clash of personalities and disciplines to look at “fundamental and systemic trends.” Clearly, he says, “something very profound is happening — and it’s largely escaped notice.” One measure of this bigger shift: “the topple rate at which US public companies in the top quartile of return on assets performance fall out of… leadership position.” That rate, he notes, increased 40 percent between 1965 and 2012.

There are lots of possible explanations for that wild increase. It seems safe to say there must be some great historical forces at work. Otherwise, Hagel writes, “one would have to believe that management is becoming significantly more incompetent over time”; and I guess nobody would seriously believe that. Here, at least, we’re meant to pass over the thought with a knowing smile: of course management has not become significantly more incompetent over time. Right?

I didn’t seriously entertain the thought of growing managerial incompetence again until I arrived at Hagel’s concluding paragraph. There, he offers a few suggestions on how incumbent players might “more effectively respond to these disruptive approaches (short of resorting to regulation and other public policy measures).” One suggestion is that management find ways to take the long view: incumbent players need “to find ways to expand the horizons of their leadership team beyond the next quarter or next year.” Myopia is always dangerous, and more dangerous now than ever before.

At the same time, short-sighted management has a history, and as I’ve suggested in my posts on the rise of the CEO, the most interesting chapter of that history starts right around the time the topple rate increases, in the 60s and 70s.

Around 1965, as profit rates in manufacturing fall and as the postwar boom yields to post-industrial reality, new ideas of management take hold. One of them is what Jack Welch once called “the dumbest idea in the world”: the doctrine of shareholder value. As this doctrine becomes boardroom religion, we see the rise of the “CEO” as corporate savior (in Rakesh Khurana’s phrase) and cultural celebrity.

Short-termism and, in some cases, risky financial manipulation become the name of the game. Compensation packages reinforce bad habits. Strategists and management consultants take their cues from the C-Suite, and tailor their offerings accordingly.

I’m not saying the rise of the CEO, the doctrine of shareholder value, or the promise of sustainable competitive advantage in the 70s and 80s explain the increase in the topple rate, but clearly they should be taken into account here; and we should give growing managerial incompetence its due. Bad ideas about what counts as business success — and misguided actions by business (and political) leaders — certainly make businesses more vulnerable to the kind of disruption that interests Hagel: the loss of leadership position.

Big scary historical forces may be overtaking us, but if competence in the face of those forces is what we’re after, then failed ideas of corporate purpose and failed models of corporate leadership ought to be called out, questioned, and radically altered or just dropped.