Corporate governance - Do things better: do nothing.

(From Financial Director)

Byline: Robert Bruce.

At the outset of this year, the Governor of the Bank of England announced a few changes of direction. They were nothing to do with, for example, interest rates. The currency markets stayed quiet. There was no great panic in Threadneedle Street. But if the changes work, there should be cause to rejoice.

In an interview, Mervyn King made it plain that the culture of senior management in the Bank should change, and he obviously hoped others might follow. In short, he said that people should think more and react less, and that in future he would keep his mornings free for reading, writing and thinking. "People must not see their jobs as reacting to their in-trays; I want them to have smaller in-trays," he said. "In the mornings, people should decide what they want the Bank to be doing. If you have a culture of being busy it stops you thinking about what you should be doing. You should be thinking about the job you are doing, not rushing from one issue to another."

The cynical will say something like 'nice work if you can get it', or they may make a remark about how long you could keep mornings free from urgent and immediate things falling into an in-tray. But for people involved in corporate governance, and looking aghast and askance at the unfolding disasters in the wake of the Italian giant conglomerate that was Parmalat, there is a message.

Auditors used to have a box to tick in their audit programmes which was labelled 'review the job'. I can recall the senior manager vanishing off to think the work over. We used to assume that a gentle snooze of an afternoon was the result. But the point was that the audit was supposed to be looked at in a tangential fashion. The people who had been grinding away at it for months should look at the overall figures, the shape of the business, and apply a bit of logic from a distance.

It was a time when there would be thinking space for the cartoon light bulb to suddenly appear above someone's head. They would then lean forward thoughtfully. "This doesn't make sense," they would suggest.