{"id":6273,"date":"2015-03-30T07:45:55","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T07:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6273"},"modified":"2015-03-30T07:45:55","modified_gmt":"2015-03-30T07:45:55","slug":"how-best-to-smell-a-rat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2015\/03\/30\/how-best-to-smell-a-rat\/","title":{"rendered":"How best to smell a rat"},"content":{"rendered":"

It's an old joke, and\u00a0the answer is 'from a safe distance<\/em>'. \u00a0However, if you're a charity trustee or a company non-exec director trying to exercise your scrutiny function, you often have little option but to do just that. \u00a0You are reliant, in other words, on what managers and tell you, most often in reports. \u00a0Getting good at reading between the lines is something you need to do.<\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a> had a good piece about this the other week. \u00a0This was written\u00a0in the light of issues at HSBC<\/a> which illustrated how easy it was for scrutinisers not to be fully informed\u00a0by managers, whilst being paid well for it. \u00a0I have, you will appreciate, no experience of these high finance dealings, but I've sat on a number of charity, NGO and school boards (and still do), and there is one thing that most of this experience tells me \u2013 there is a tendency for those who\u00a0chair such boards to get very close to senior managers \u2013 whilst not<\/em> being paid for it. \u00a0This is completely understandable, and I make absolutely no claims of corrupt or undue influence. \u00a0However, to a degree, it\u00a0means that the scrutiny function has to be carried out not just in relation to senior management, but in terms of the relationship of those managers and the chair of the board.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It's an old joke, and\u00a0the answer is 'from a safe distance'. \u00a0However, if you're a charity trustee or a company non-exec director trying to exercise your scrutiny function, you often have little option but to do just that. \u00a0You are...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-new-publications"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}