Jan: So what I'd like to do now is to move to our next slide and pass over the presentation and conversation to two colleagues. We're joined today with Aki from Australia who's talking to us from Japan, and Nick who is also in Australia who's talking to us from Australia, as well. And so we would like to start the presentation now.
Nick: OK so Aki, do you want to introduce this, the image?
Aki: Yes. So this is the, our first slide, practically the first slide, which is showing Senbon Torii which is, means, 1000 gates at the Japanese shrine. These gates have been donated by people and companies, to give thanks to success or pray for the future. And they form path built by many individual contributions.
So we have this because this is a simple metaphor for future generational governance because each decision we make, you know, today is like adding one gate and together they create the path that future generations will walk on. So, please, next slide.
Nick: Thank you, and before we go any further, we'll acknowledge countries. So thank you for joining the webinar. And acknowledging country is a tradition, if you like, or a modern tradition, if nothing else in, in Australia, but also, I think a quite old tradition for the traditional owners of the land. And so in Australia, we acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we live and work, and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging.
And obviously that's an Australian tradition, and it may be a tradition in other parts of the world, but in the UK and elsewhere, it's not so much of a tradition. But we did want to highlight, and with that Earthrise picture there, how no matter how far back we go, and no matter where we live and work, we're always walking in the footsteps of generations of humans past.
And this probably feeds into the whole context of this presentation, both with what Aki talked about in terms of stewardship and the future and obviously us inheriting from the past too. Next slide, please.
So that's myself, on the left or the right, I'm not quite sure, but Professor Nick Barter, I'm a Professor in Strategy and 好色先生TV at Griffith University, which is in Brisbane, Australia, and I'm also a Visiting Fellow at 好色先生TV and the founder of Future Normal.
In the middle is our colleague Professor Jan Bebbington, who welcomed us at the start. She's a Professor in Accounting and Director of the Pentland Centre for 好色先生TV in Business at 好色先生TV in the UK.
And then we just also, just heard from Dr Akihiro Omura, who is a Senior Lecturer in Finance at Griffith University and had previously been an equity analyst at Mitsubishi and SMBCE Nikko. Next slide, please.
So why are we looking at generational governance? Well, the pure and simple fact is we're looking at it because of the roots of really mine and Jan and, to a degree, Aki's perspective. And it is about that stewardship perspective, and the sustainable development definition typically cited is the Brundtland definition from 1987, which developed, which is "development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
A lot gets loaded onto this definition, but really what I want us to be reminded of and focus on is: it's about time. We can load on, people often load on all sorts of other concepts and ideas. But at the core, that is about people and time, and moving and, kind of ,passing from one generation to the next.
And that, that's really what's driven this whole notion of generational governance where we have to steward our world, if you like, to a degree, into the next phase. And that kind of maxim there, or that definition, is a guide for how we might think about and do this in organisations. So, next slide, please.
So one of the challenges you have with thinking about future generations is often people will talk about unborn generations, and we can end up in all sorts of philosophical cul-de-sacs around what do unborn people who don't have a say and aren't around want? And what we've done and what we continually do is take a practical turn, and we say a generation is 30 years.
So when we think about meeting the needs of future generations, we actually think about meeting the needs of those for example, I'm 56 years old, so it's about meeting the needs of those 26 years younger than me. And the average age of a CEO is 57 years old and the average age of a board member of an organisation is 60 years old.
And so what we think about with future generations and understanding who they are in the context of a typical organisation is: it's a CEO or a board member, speaking to somebody who may be between the age of 27 and 30 years old. And the important thing there is that's very practical. It's very likely in a lot of organisations.
And the other thing is it's not about speaking to, again, as we worked our way through this subject, you know, it's not about speaking to children or anything like that. These are 27- to 30-year-olds, you know, performing agents in our world if you like and not waiting for anything to come along. They're there and part of organisations, likely to be making decisions, could well have management roles, etcetera, etcetera.
So this, this practical turn that we're talking about here means that we can suddenly start to action the idea of thinking about what comes next for the next generation, or for future generations, in a very practical way as opposed to a kind of philosophical cul-de-sac type way. Next slide please.
And so that then puts us to, kind of, the last stake in the ground before we talk about the surveys, to say: what do we mean by generational governance? Well, in the work we did, we had two ideas that we gave respondents.
The first is a main board with greater age diversity. And because the average age of a board member is 60, putting age diversity in there would mean you'd have people between 30 to 60 years old on a main board of an organisation, something that is the exception, if at all, relative to the norm.
And then the other option we offered respondents was a next generation committee to advise the main board, and that next generation committee would be compromised of individuals around 30 years old, and we didn't want to be specific to 30 years old, but around 30 years old.
So those are the two ideas we gave our survey respondents as we explored their perceptions. Next slide, please. Aki, over to you.
Aki: Yes. So this is the survey that we have conducted last year. So altogether we had 3000 respondents, 1000 each from each country, Japan, UK and in Australia. And the average age of this survey of respondents was 43 years old.
So you know, they're in the middle age and the diverse, you know, gender diversity is quite well, diverse, 55% male, 45% female. And more than 60% of people had a bachelor degree. So, you know, we don't say the qualification matters in terms of how the company is being run or you know, has ability to run the company. But then we have large number of respondents with the higher degrees.
And 100% of our respondents being working full-time, and 30% on board and C-Suite. And interestingly, not 100% of the respondents were from the profit generation organisation, but it's actually 30% were from not-for-profit organisations. So it actually shows, you know, our responses or results likely to show the general perceptions of those who were likely to take the role in the next generation. Next slide, please.
So having conducted the survey, we have conducted quantitative analysis and we have reached two, you know, broad results or conclusions. One is: according to our respondents' responses, we think that the organisations, we believe that the organisation do consider future generations. But at the same time we found that they would still benefit from, you know, having generational governance will benefit further. In terms of organisations to make socially just decisions, and decisions to achieve the net zero target.
And by the way, the report is available for the public now. And, if you're interested, there's a QR code for you to access the report's tables. So please feel free to visit them, and hopefully you can cite our paper, report in your future publications. All right, next slide please.
And then the second broad conclusion we have reached is: although organisations see the benefits of generational governance, as I mentioned just then, there is some resistance to implementing generational governance. For example, you know, sharing power or young people, whether they have skills or not.
And also, but at the same time, we found that the respondents feel that there are many benefits to generational governance, for example, greater ability to attract talent, enhanced long term value, etcetera, etcetera.
So these are the, our general conclusions. And in the next two slides we'd like to show you the actual result, visualised result.
First of all, this question asked respondents on what they would think would be the possible barriers for implementing generational governance. And as you can see, the respondents, none of the questions had more than, you know, 50% of respondents saying yes, they are barriers. Right?
And also, interestingly, for which ones are - the one on the right side - so this is saying, asking whether the pressure of the role on young people actually are the barriers? But then considering this, more than 70% of people are actually believing that this is not the barrier.
And also second from the right - which is the willingness of current leaders to invest in capability building to ensure generational governance was effective. So only 36% of board or C-Suite believed these are, this is the barrier.
So what we're seeing is that the respondents are believing that, you know, barriers to implement generational governance are not so high. Can you turn to the next slide?
And in this question we asked what are the benefits of generational governance? And interestingly a large percentage of C-Suite recognises the benefit of generational governance, than non C-Suite respondents. Which was a little bit different from the previous question. Because previous question had quite similar results, for both you know, board and C-Suite or, and non-board C-Suite.
And then this difference is seen especially in the case of attracting talented younger generation. So as C-suites are taking more important role for the company to be, you know, to be, keep going, you know, going concern, this result is very positive for progressing with the generational board, from our perspective. Next slide, please.
Jan: And this is where I take over the storyline, thanks to my previous two colleagues. And this is really why we produce a report, but also why we're running this webinar. Because the survey gives us a glimpse into what's going on among you know, a relatively small, but a representative sample of businesspeople.
And so what we think we're taking from the survey is that this is a topic area worth investigating more. That organisations don't see massive disadvantages or massive impediments to doing this practice, but also that it will generate successful outcomes in a whole variety of ways. And we don't know how they're related to each other. But again, that's the reason why we're having this wider conversation.
And our interest was, sort of, piqued in this topic area because we know of some organisations in some countries where generational governance approaches, most often with young boards, actually exists.
So it's not a common practice and it'll be really interesting to hear from colleagues in the discussion, whether or not they've seen it, because we're really sort of taken that there's colleagues here from, you know, Taiwan, Japan and Italy. So there may be hidden practice that we don't know about.
We know that it's quite a usual practice in the Netherlands. So the Port of Amsterdam, for example, has a youth board that they've had for quite some period of time. And these are younger people who are working within the organisation who have been trained up to be able to have conversations with the main board.
So what we would like to do after a conversation with yourselves, is we'd like to see if we could get a framework to better understand this practice, and to be able to maybe provide more examples of how people undertake this approach.
So we're sort of coming to the, the end of the conversation. But one other thing I'd say here is that we know that family business, if you like, has a natural inclination towards generational governance. Because it's generations of the same family that are involved in running the business. So we think there's something instructive and interesting that we might be able to understand from family business settings as well.
And then here are the prompts for our discussion. And so once we close down the slideshow and stop recording, we'll pop those prompts in the chat as well so you can still have access to them.
But we're really quite interested in hearing well, what's your experience? Have you heard of this practice? Have you seen how it operates in particular firms? And also it's not a bolt on, in terms of you could imagine having a, a young generation board, but then if nobody actually has the power to say or to do things or aren't trained to, then that might require much more fundamental change in corporate governance in general. And then any insights, questions, observations are really welcome.
