Looking Back to Look Forward

Yesterday was my 60th birthday – an opportunity to look back on my life and maybe, with a small yet growing degree of unease an invitation to look forward. My day started yesterday opening a very thoughtful present – a newspaper printed on Monday 30th January 1961! The main headline on the Evening Standard – “JFK warns of impending crisis“. This article was focused on the Cuban missile crisis. It would appear we have not moved on – the tapestry of our lives is woven into one crisis after another – our challenge is to not let this noise distract us. The second page ” Flu Crisis – Hospital Bed Shortage”. Not much more to add!

I reflected on my flirtation with the world of work – starting in September 1979 and a story that continues to be written up to this day. My first job was as an internal auditor on a grand salary of £3,000 per annum. Why internal audit? Who knows – I needed a job and a merchant bank offered me one in its audit function. This quirk of fate gave me the privilege of practising as an internal auditor over many years as a junior, as a manager and as an advisor. A career that has allowed me to see the world, meet many different types of people and see businesses from top to bottom and side to side.

I recall that my first inter-action with computers involved flowcharting the controls associated with batch processing and punch cards. I also recall that if I wanted to move a computer file I needed to be skilled in the language associated with Ms Dos (is that correct?). Now we have the wonders of GUI’s and IPhones (a computer that is exponentially more powerful that anything that landed man on the moon in 1969).

My career has morphed from an acute interest in preventative and detective controls to a much more complex concept the human being and, in particular, understanding why people behave they way they do. I am fascinated in conduct and the the stimulus that leads to misconduct. In my first decade of work, companies were only interested in conduct aimed at pleasing two stakeholder groups – the customer / client who could take their business elsewhere and the shareholder who could sell their shares. In the 1990’s the era of the regulatory stakeholder was born. New laws gave teeth to enforcement, saw the birth of the influential compliance officer and a whole new cottage industry. The turn of the century brought a whole new group of stakeholders into play. All of sudden society as a whole seemed to matter. The power of the media to “name and shame” companies that did not treat their employees well became important. As the millennial generation and Generation Z entered the workplace, the way companies treat people and the environment has become a critical factor in defining acceptable behaviour.

That’s a brief look in the rear view mirror. But what about the future?

My aim remains to have fun. Fun for me involves helping people develop – provoking thought on the human condition and continuing to do my little bit to leave the world in a better condition than I found it.