By any standards 2024 has been a tumultuous year both in Corporate and Public worlds. With major shifts and changes in the Political Landscape continuing to ripple through the Globe, there are inevitably impacts on the Business World. While we can anticipate some re-orientation and disorientation on some themes and targets such as energy and DEI which have emerged in 2024, Business should continue the focus on the existing underlying Consumer and Governance trends.
There has been considerable success in improving the participation of women on Boards of the FTSE 350 at around 40%. A key aspect of this progression was compliance with targets, facilitated by removing the recruitment blockers and ‘qualification’ barriers to women achieving Non-Executive Director roles. However, in Executive Leadership roles there remains a significant lag, with women in Executive Leadership positions at 35% in the FTSE 350 and only 28% participation of women in the key Executive Committee of the Business. Crucially there is a significant and persistent deficit of women in the pivotal role of CEO, currently only 9% of CEOs in the FTSE 350 are women.
Board Chairs and Directors are committed to the oversight of their organisations in order to achieve effective performance and sustainability. While the challenges of achieving this are various and multiple there is one stand-out challenge which requires the organisation to be aware, agile, change focused and brave. Namely the challenge of Technology-Digital transformation.
Helen Pitcher will be chairing CRF's annual conference on Building and Sustaining Great Organisations on the 12th October 2021. The conference will be both in-person and online. You can register for the event here.
ESG is becoming a key focus for shareholders and we are all having to adjust to the learning curve.
To learn more about how your organisation can sign up as an “Accelerator for the UN Initiative Race to Zero”, go to their website. This site gives access to free toolkits that will be invaluable to inform your team and Board.
When we look back at the ‘good the bad and the ugly’ of the Covid Crisis, there will be many lessons to be learnt and best practices reviewed to prepare for any future global pandemic.
Some will be very practical lessons such as the need for quick reactions on key activities like trace and isolation, social distancing and using protective masks.
Some will be structural, such as responding to early warning systems as in New Zealand, or quickly deployable and scalable testing and tracing as in Germany, or rapidly deployable ‘critical care’ hospital capacity as in the UK.
