The Moorad Choudhry Anthology, + Website

CHAPTER 17Present and Future Principles of Governance and Culture

“Someone once said, ‘Great men talk about ideas, good people talk about things, and everybody else talks about people’…Consequently, I seldom enjoy talking about people, either within our own group or outside.”

—Neil Armstrong, quoted in C. Nelson, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, John Murray Publishers, 2009

Corporate governance is a discipline in its own right. For example, the academic journal Corporate Governance – An International Review celebrated its 25^th year in 2017. While that may not necessarily make the subject a “science”, it does indicate that it's a reasonably distinct specialism that deserves to be taken seriously. Culture, on the other hand, is a slightly more elusive topic to define. However, both of these arts are very important aspects of finance in general and bank management in particular. Anyone who disagrees with this, especially with respect to wider financial markets and not just banking, should read What They Do With Your Money by Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik, and David Pitt‐Watson (Yale University Press, 2016). A more damning indictment of the financial system in place in most Western countries would be hard to find: the authors identify culture and governance as being at the heart of much of what is negative in the industry.

The governance framework and culture was self‐evidently flawed in every crashed Western bank of 2007–2008. That nothing overmuch was ...