In Case You Missed It: Business News Round-up

martin1Contributed by Martin Mitchell of the Corporate Training Group

The meeting of finance ministers of the G20 called for much bigger and better capital buffers to be held by banks. US Treasury secretary Tim Geithner declared that he is taking the first step towards unwinding policies that have propped up the US financial system. The UK’s monetary policy committee voted to keep interest rates at 0.5%. These are but a few highlights of important market events that we’ve gathered to help you start the week well informed.

Economic Backdrop

  • As expected, the meeting of finance ministers of the G20 called for much bigger and better capital buffers to be held by banks. The details to be finalised before the full G20 gathering in Pittsburgh on the 24th and 25th of September will include stricter rules about what is acceptable as a capital buffer, plus the requirement for complex institutions to develop ‘living wills’ to plan for their unwinding.
  • US Treasury secretary Tim Geithner declared that he is taking the first step towards unwinding policies that have propped up the US financial system by allowing the guarantee for the $2,500bn money market mutual fund industry to expire on schedule at the end of the month. He said it was time to move from crisis response to recovery.
  • The UK’s monetary policy committee voted to keep interest rates at 0.5%, and made no changes to its £175bn programme of quantitative easing.

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On Your Bookshelf: How Did That Happen? Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way

By Andrea Newell (Grand Rapids. Michigan)books

Companies are struggling with how to facilitate true accountability within their organizations, seeing it as a path to recovery from the current economic crisis and an important component in a plan to stave off future disasters. In their new book, How Did That Happen? Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way, workplace accountability experts Roger Connors and Tom Smith build upon the concepts in their two previous books—The Oz Principle, which focused on personal accountability, and The Journey to the Emerald City, which addressed how to create an accountable culture— to show how accountability within an organization is essential to its success.

The first half of the book shines a spotlight on the importance of the leadership role. Whether supervisor or CEO, the reader is asked to take an honest look at her leadership style, relationships with the people on whom she depends for results, and her effectiveness in achieving the results she wants. The authors emphasize that, before a manager can promote personal accountability in her organization, she has to embrace it herself, and that the whole group, including leadership, shares responsibility for not achieving the desired results.

Two Steps for Defining Accountability Expectations in Your Organization

Defining expectations is crucial to fostering personal accountability in subordinates and other colleagues. The authors have created the Accountability Sequence, a systematic approach to establishing accountability in an organization. The Sequence is divided into two components: the Outer Ring, which zeroes in on leadership behavior and the importance of establishing clear expectations, and the Inner Ring, which addresses unmet expectations and defines the four main causes (poor motivation, inadequate training, too little personal accountability, ineffective culture) and the four solutions (motivation, training, culture, accountability). The authors also advise that one needs to step back and look at accountability not just within one’s organization, but also of all the stakeholders in your “Expectations Chain,” beginning with vendors and continuing all the way down to customers.

Using examples from their twenty years in accountability consulting, events in history, and even the varied responses to natural disasters, Connors and Smith show how unmet expectations, poor assumptions, and a lack of accountability lead to failure time and time again. On the other side, Connors and Smith have an equal number of success stories that illustrate the power of positive accountability throughout an organization. Although most of the client names have been changed, readers will recognize companies like Sprint, figures such as Henry Kissinger and Jack Welch, and events such as Hurricane Katrina, Apollo 13 and the Mars Orbiter in the examples put forth by the authors. Read more

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Voice of Experience: Kathleen Weslock, Head of Human Resources, SunGard

Kathleen Weslockby Pamela Weinsaft (New York)

“A career isn’t just climbing straight up a ladder – it is more like a garden lattice. There are many steps along the way and at each juncture, a chance to learn a lot about yourself and your profession,” said Kathleen Weslock, the head of Human Resources at leading software and IT services company, SunGard Data Systems.

The Crooked Career Path

A Spanish and psychology double major at Hood College in Maryland, Weslock started her career as a switchboard operator at the Pan American Health Organization. Because she was fluent in Spanish, less than six months later, she was “promoted” to secretary in the human resources department. The head of employee relations needed someone who could keep information confidential and who could translate for her. “While this job may seem menial to many, I learned a lot from this position and from Mariko; she taught me the importance of having a solid work ethic at an early stage in my career. I learned so much, from basic level employee relations to discretion to the proper code of conduct. She was a marvelous woman,” explained Weslock.

She then went to work as a secretary in the HR and training department of the US Chamber of Commerce and worked her way up to the assistant director, where she ran training programs that taught business executives how to lobby in Washington, DC. “But I was still typing,” laughed Weslock.

She then went to work as a secretary in the training department of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and worked her way up to teaching business executives how to lobby in Washington, D.C. She was also rubbing elbows with business leaders, top columnists, and powerful business executives. “But I was still typing,” laughed Weslock.

At one of the labor relation sessions she organized, some of the influential executives encouraged her to go to grad school or law school and pursue labor relations as a career. “At that point I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with my career. I didn’t think I wanted to be a lawyer, but I did find the thought of a career in labor relations interesting. So it was really a chance meeting with individuals who really cared about helping young people with their careers that gave me the impetus to decide to go back to graduate school.”

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Transition Services Helping Asset Management Firms Make Advances

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By Elizabeth Harrin (London)Wall St

It’s been a long time coming, but asset management firms are finally winning back market share in the transition services arena. As banks and brokers drop out of the marketplace, asset management firms are moving back in.

The Move Away from Transition Managers

Transition services is a business area which helps institutional investors transition from one fund manager to another, switch global pension deals, rebalance their portfolios or shift into a new asset class. It always involves a lot of funds, and it’s always complicated. A year on since Lehman Brothers Holdings – a major player in transition services – collapsed, other global banks have also cut out or scaled back their transition divisions, including Citi­group, Royal Bank of Scotland Group and UBS.

It’s not always the banks that are pushing investors away as they reduce their involvement in this area. There are signs that investors are also losing confidence in the bigger names, and turning to specialist or smaller firms – firms that can provide the certainty that their transition services business is a key market distinguisher. The shift in market share has also been helped by the fact that technology and trading venues that were once only available to broker/dealers are now much more widely accessible and firms choosing to put transition services at the heart of their business have the technology skills and budgets to put them on a level playing field.

That said, transition managers themselves are expensive people to have around: they have a highly skilled role, often with a broad background in finance and excellent risk management ability. They also have to be great at managing the relationships with clients and keep a lot of balls in the air at the same time. No investor wants to start a massive portfolio shift and build a relationship with someone in a firm where transitions are an ancillary part of the business and could get cut in the next round of cost-saving measures. Read more

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Women Leading the Way in Sustainable Investments

iStock_000001735577XSmall[1]by Liz O’Donnell (Boston)

Green mutual funds might seem like the hottest new trends on Wall Street but women in this industry are adamant that green investing is not a passing fad. According to the Social Investment Forum, an association of socially responsible investing firms and professionals, socially responsible investing represents an estimated $2.71 trillion. From 2005 to 2007, this segment of the market grew at a rate of 18 percent.

“Green business is not a trend,” says Vicki Radden, Managing Director of the Capital Markets Partnership. “It’s a new way of approaching business that is not an option. It is a requirement.” The Capital Markets Partnership (“CMP”) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit coalition of investors, investment banks, insurers, city, state and federal government, countries, and NGOs creating a market shift toward sustainable investment. Says Radden, “The Capital Market Partnership provides advocacy for various financial products and pushes forward the agenda within the capital markets to drive financial entities to develop, support, invest and promote.”

Radden likens the so-called trend in sustainable investing to the dot com era in the early nineties. Back then, companies viewed adding a dot com to their names and creating an Internet presence as a “hot” idea and key differentiator. However, a few years later, it was standard operating procedure; a requirement for doing business.

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Ask-A-Career Coach: What Do You Do When Your Contacts Don’t Respond?

Contributed by Caroline Ceniza-Levine of SixFigureStartjobsearch

I have left several messages for people who know me well, but they haven’t called me back. What else can I do? I’d like to talk to them about my job search.

I’m not sure from the question how many times you have tried to reach your contacts, but I always advise a minimum of three times, including different medium (i.e., phone and email, not just one or the other). With email, you are never sure if the person even received it. Perhaps it went to his/her “spam” folder. Perhaps the person thought s/he responded but accidentally deleted it instead. The same goes for a phone message. So, at a minimum, you should try to contact someone three times by at least two different methods.

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Voice of Experience: Christi Pedra, CEO, Siemens Hearing Instruments

Christi_Pedra[1]The concept of the “corporate ladder” is such a common analogy that many in the business world only see their careers in terms of the rungs they haven’t been able to reach. According to Christi Pedra, CEO of Siemens Hearing Instruments, that kind of thinking may be a mistake. Pedra prefers to think of the ladder as a rock climb where there are more directions in a career path than strictly moving up.

“My [25 years] at Siemens hasn’t always been a vertical rise to the top,” she said. “I’ve taken many lateral moves and they’ve provided me with some excellent, much-needed experience. You’ve got your feet firmly planted, but sometimes you need to move to the left or right before you can make it to the top.”

Pedra has a knack for seeing opportunities others might miss if they only look upward. After graduating from a state college, she started her climb with non-profits such as the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the March of Dimes and spent a great deal of time managing community outreach.

In 1980, Pedra entered the business world via the telecommunications industry, first with Nortel, then with ROLM. While working on an MBA from Rutgers University, she continued her career climb, this time at Siemens. There, she volunteered for projects offering significant growth potential, but these also required her to venture into unfamiliar territory.

“You can’t be afraid to go out on a limb,” Pedra said. “That’s where the fruit is.”
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Happy Labor Day!

iStock_000005583781XSmall[1]We are off enjoying the last days of summer.  We’ll be back tomorrow with more great profiles of women breaking the glass ceiling and other news  from the trenches in fund management, finance, law and big business.

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Executive Women in East Asia: Still Few and Far Between, But Growing in Number

istock_000003577385xsmall1By Lily H. Li (New York City)

Women make up only 10% of all the executives in South Korea and most corporations have only one or two female executives. And it is worse in the financial industry: Hye-Ryun Kang and Chris Rowley note in their case study, “Women in Management in South Korea: Advancement or Retrenchment?,” in Women in Asian Management that out of 710 executives in 140 companies only 1.1% in that East Asian country’s finance firms are female.

“Contrasting with worldwide trends, this time of feminization in financial areas,” observe Kang and Rowley, pointing to data that show South Korea’s ranking behind Canada (35%), the United Kingdom (33%), Mexico (22%), Hong Kong (21%), China (19%) and Egypt (11%) in terms of the percentage of female managers.

So why the disparity? To begin, culture. “Confucianism is often characterized as a system of social and ethical philosophy rather than a religion,” explains Judith A. Berling, a professor of Chinese and comparative religions at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. “[It] built on an ancient religious foundation to establish the social values, institutions, and transcendent ideals of traditional Chinese society.”  And Confucian values support male superiority and female subordination, according to Vimolwan Yukongdi and Rowley in  their book  The Changing Face of Women Managers in Asia.

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Voice of Experience: Alison Sanger, Chief Operating Officer, Ironwood Capital Management

alison_sanger1by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

The last nine months have been the toughest of Alison Sanger’s career. As COO of Ironwood Capital Management, she has worked incredibly hard to help the firm navigate the choppy waters of the financial crisis. But Sanger had an additional challenge as she had her third child right in the middle of the chaos. “It was a kind of a crazy intersection of all things. I’m a ‘put one foot in front of the other’ kind of girl, so I think that, right now, I’m most proud of having survived and come out the other side.”

Sanger hails from a small town in Michigan, and majored in accounting at Miami University (Ohio). But when she first entered university, accounting seemed the least likely path she would take. “I tested out of all the English classes but into remedial math going into college. So how does someone like that end up in accounting? I’m really competitive and considered it a challenge. So I got to work and took a lot of math classes. And, as I took the classes, I realized I was good at them and enjoyed them. That, combined with the idea that I would be employable in a very slow job market, is what got me into accounting.”

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