The Director: Jon Mayson. Outspoken and unbowed
(May 2013)
Jon Mayson has slipped seamlessly from successful chief executive to chairman of several boards. But he’s disappointed with the governance practices he’s found in many boardrooms. He talks to Reg Birchfield.
The Director: The paradox of IPOs
(May 2013)
An initial public offering or IPO is a company’s “coming out party” – it involves private companies offering their shares to the public for the first time. Recently we have seen with the Mighty River Power IPO that even the invitation to the coming out party, the pre-registration, has caused great investor excitement. The first public share offering called the pubicani occurred in the Roman Republic, around 509 BC. Here public investors bought and traded shares in an over-the-counter market in the economic centre of Rome.
The Director: The path less travelled … the diversity ‘way forward’
(May 2013)
New Zealand is a wonderful country. We are fair minded and embrace a multicultural society, doing pretty well at it for the most part. We’ve led the way on gay marriage, you might conclude equality is in our DNA. Yet the boardrooms of our nation remain, for the most part, very ‘unequal’, dominated by a narrow slice of a population: European males mostly 50 plus. And we do talk a lot about diversity.
