IIMB hosts conference on emerging challenges of corporate governance

Indian Institute of Bangalore’s Centre for Corporate Governance and Citizenship (CCGC), IIMB in collaboration with Florida International University College of Business (FIU Business), USA, hosted the 2019 Corporate Governance Conference on June 14th and 15th at its campus.

The conference provided a unique platform where academics, practitioners, corporate executives and regulators came together to understand the intricacies of corporate governance practices, regulations and their costs and benefits to various stakeholders in India and USA.

The conference took place over a period of two days. In addition to the research presentations on the first day, there were panel discussions involving participants from the industry and regulators the next day.

The initial day of the conference, 14 June, focused on inaugural plenary session by Dr. S Raghunath, Chair, Centre for Corporate Governance and Citizenship and professor of Strategy at IIMB; Gopal Naik, Prof and Chair- Economics & Social Sciences, IIMB; Krishnan Dandapani, Professor Of Finance And Director - Professional MBA Programs, Florida International University, USA, Joanne Li, Dean, Florida International University, College of Business, USA, Matam Venkata Rao, Executive Director, Canara Bank and G Narayanan, Chairman, Vijaya Bank.

According to S Raghunath: “This is an attempt to bring together an extraordinary community of scholars and practitioners whose work pertains to the niche area of the emerging challenges of corporate governance. It is the phenomenon of ‘change’ that is increasing the complexity of corporate governance. There is a trade-off between the governance system that encourages long term focus and one that gives importance to the short term. The tension between stability and change is embedded in the governance system.”

Gopal Naik said, “We have a number of programs at IIMB which are making an impact on all the businesses and as socially responsible educational institution, we welcome everyone on this conference to discuss about the emerging challenges of corporate governance, an essential stakeholder conversation in both profit and non-profit organizations.”

S Raghunath said: “The future of boards is in moving away from being just compliance centric and hindsight driven contributions to becoming value creation centric and foresight based interventions. Current board and board committees have been influenced to a major extent by regulatory demands Technological changes are defining and shaping our globally connected economy and providing new growth opportunities for businesses.” He advised Boards to look at new business models, at competition and at how technology could be harnessed. “Boards may have to emphasize forward looking perspective in the form of future focused sub committees instead of remaining glued to past orientation with predominant emphasis on the control and monitoring functions. Better corporate governance demands updated board room talent, structure, information to be effective,” he added.