Editorial comment.

AuthorPrickett, Ruth
PositionManagement of corporate governance - Editorial

If winter is the time of our discontent, then spring should herald a period of renewed growth and optimism. This certainly seems to be true of the economy, where the green shoots of recovery are at last showing above the dead leaves of downturn--at least in the US and UK (page 11). For the past couple of years many firms have understandably concentrated on surviving and demonstrating rigorous corporate governance. Now, however, they should be looking afresh at their future development plans, analysing risks and budgeting for growth.

Of course, this is not to say that the lessons they learnt the hard way in the late 1990s should be ignored. The important thing is to strike the right balance between maintaining security with strong corporate governance and allowing the business to take the risks it needs to take if it is to develop. The International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) and CIMA have worked together on a joint project to analyse how this balance can be attained without compromising security or inhibiting growth. Their resulting enterprise governance report (page 12) highlights the results of research into success and failure in 27 companies worldwide. CIMA has incorporated these findings into a strategic scorecard that's designed to allow boards to keep all the crucial areas in view and to prompt directors to ask the right questions and thereby keep their firms on track. As CIMA's chief executive, Charles Tilley, says, none of the individual findings is rocket science, but it would be foolish to think that, just because a system is simple, it is necessarily easy to execute well. He acknowledges that it will be costly and time-consuming to put the...

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