Corporate Maturity and the "Authentic Company"

David Jackman

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781631577772
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Derecho mercantil

Corporate maturity is introduced as a new and valuable concept that provides a holistic view of an organization's performance, culture and resilience. This book presents a general model of corporate maturity, applicable to any sector and demonstrates how an organization can enhance its maturity, particularly through a focus on ethics, good governance and community outcomes. The author shows how mature organizations are those that find connections between corporate purpose and wider social needs. The authentic company, much in demand by investors, consumers, regulators, and employees, is one that can be trusted to deliver these needs as result of deeply embedded integrity, uncompromising unconditionality and outcomes rooted in sustainable communities.

PART I

What

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Corporate maturity is an overall, holistic view of an organization’s health, wealth, and potential. Customers, for example, will often, if only intuitively, detect a “mature” approach that leads them to trust an organization and be more inclined to deal with it and perhaps become loyal to that brand. Similarly, discerning investors who look beyond the usual numbers and potential business partners may well be looking for signs of genuine reliability, resilience, and sustainability. They will calculate that an organization that is more likely to make sensible, wise, long-term decisions is likely to be one worth investing in. Similarly, employees may well increasingly be attracted to mature organizations that appear to have clear community-centered values they can identify with, and those higher quality employees may then be more likely to stay with a mature, and we might add, “enlightened” or “authentic” organization (expressions often used synonymously). And, importantly, regulators, government agencies, and international as well as national standards bodies, increasingly are judging organizations by the maturity of their culture and governance, rather than the processes and controls they operate. A mature organization can reasonably expect to develop a more balanced relationship with their regulators, which in itself can have immense financial and reputational value.

This book aims to:

• Explore the value of corporate maturity.

• Discover how maturity can be developed.

• Investigate ways of measuring and presenting maturity.

The same will be covered, in brief form, with respect to authenticity.

The arguments and methodologies set out here are applicable to companies of all types and sizes, in any sector or jurisdiction. The approach also works for noncommercial organizations, public and government bodies, charities, and the voluntary sector. This is largely a conceptual text but is based on extensive experience, research, and case examples from many sectors and countries.

We pay particular attention to the maturity of regulatory bodies as it is suggested that these should develop side by side with the sector that they regulate and at approximately the same pace to ensure both their supervisory effectiveness and in order to provide an enabling framework for the wider maturity of the sector.

As corporate life is an important part of many of our everyday lives and of our wider society, we also consider the interrelationship between corporate maturity and a broader social maturity. This becomes integral to the way in which communities develop, deepen, and build resilience and is, obviously, a two-way process.

Finally, we should remove any suggestion of a moral imperative here. Maturity does not necessarily equal a high moral quality, nor should any suggestion of immaturity mean necessarily “unethical,” however, mature organizations, we suggest, are more likely to be conscious of their values, have them more carefully thought through and embedded ethics in their culture and operate what we shall term later, a system of “good” governance. Maturity is a collective state of mind, a set of characteristics and qualities, potentials, and abilities, and these can be exhibited in a small start up in an emerging sector as much as an organization that has been around for decades in a traditional sector. Freshness of thought and the ability to adapt are as much features of maturity as wisdom and endurance.

CHAPTER 2

What Is Corporate Maturity?

Corporate maturity is not a single concept. It is a compound of many contributing factors that intersect to produce a complex set of attributes. It is unlikely that all these factors are present or exhibited to the same extent in any one organization, but to conceptualize the presence of maturity it is necessary to hypothesize that a “mature organization” needs to have a critical mass of these characteristics and attributes at any one time to be considered overall “mature.” This calculation allows for maturity to be developed and shown in different ways and so mature organizations may have different complexions. It also allows organizations to be just in the mature category or deeply mature and for any organization to slide backwards. There is no certainty that mature organization will remain so. In fact, it remains a constant task to continue development and sustain maturity.

Maturity is the result of a judgment about a combination of characteristics. In many ways, seeing corporate maturity is similar to the everyday judgment that we make when we evaluate the maturity of individual human beings. We frequently refer to someone being “mature” or behaving in an immature way, and the characteristics we are referring to in doing this are readily understood and recognized, and rarely, if ever, defined. It is an intangible whole, but one that most people recognize subjectively and place a great deal of importance of their judgment. It is the same in the case of our everyday and professional reactions to organizations and our overarching view deeply affects our understanding and appreciation of companies and their activities. We need, therefore, to allow ourselves to view organizations in the round and to find reliable ways of trusting these critical judgments. It really is an example of “the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.”

What are these factors that combined to produce maturity? The following Table 2.1. sets out a comprehensive series of characteristics that are, by definition, closely interconnected and interdependent—and mutually supportive. It is not possible to be a completely inclusive list, and neither is it suggested that all factors are of equal weight in every situation. However, it would be unusual for a major category to be missing. The factors cited here are phrased in a way that applies to the maturity of the whole organization, but they also could, with minimal adaption, refer to the characteristics of the corporate leadership team, or, looking in the other direction, to the wider community of which the organization or business is part.

Table 2.1 Dimensions of maturity

Better quality decision making

Capable of seeing wider perspectives—wider community impacts, longer-term view, multiple stakeholders, multiple layers, ethical considerations. Combining many factors in a “rounded” way—drawing together disparate and disconnected factors draws from a wide variety of sources (each of which needs to be evaluated for their credibility and validity). Balancing different and competing interests—holding opposing views in tension. Able to deal with fine or close judgments and cope with multiple “grey areas”—and being able to identify the decisive differentiator. Being incisive and discerning what is really important to the organization and the community as a whole taking all stakeholders into account—that is, looking more deeply (we might call this wisdom and may refer to this as considering the “spirit” of the case, place, decision, and so on). These aspects in combination may be referred to as “Seeing the bigger picture.”

Integrity

Holding on to principles and values or ethics under pressure and consistently, even when it is not in your in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Part I What
• Part II How
• Part III Why
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index
• Backcover