GOOD CORPORATE GOVERNANCE, SUSTAINABILITY AND RESPONSIBLE COMPETITIVENESS
3 Good Corporate Governance, Sustainability and Responsible Competitiveness About the Author
Abdulkareem Abu Alnasr is Chief Executive Officer of The National Commercial Bank (NCB), the most prominent of Saudi banks and the second largest bank in terms of assets in the Arab World.
Short term orientation and failed governance is at the heart of the global financial crisis. Significantly improved corporate governance – including a focus on a wider range of economic, environmental and social risks and opportunities – will be essential to recovery. This is also simply good for business, and when applied by large numbers of companies and supported by government policy, can result in enhanced national and regional competitiveness. Governance and the Financial Crisis The current economic crisis is having an enormous global economic and social cost in terms of millions of lost jobs, personal savings lost, impoverishment, and loss of trust in financial institutions and participants. Its effects have spread to the Arab region, impacting different countries, cities, and companies to differing extents. Although some Arab countries will likely be among top performing global countries during this crisis, all Arab countries have and will continue to be significantly negatively impacted. How did this happen? The crisis is the result of several failures, but ultimately they come down to a failure of governance systems and ethics, both at the corporate level (and in particular, financial institutions) and at the institutional level. Writing about good governance as a financial institution at this time is therefore both a humbling and daunting task. But now is also the time to consider what went wrong, what needs to be done to address it, and how we can assure those changes will be successfully implemented. A recovery requires an improved system, in which people can better trust.
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