“Looking for good governance – can co-ops get it right?”

“Stay different, and don’t ape the corporate governance structures of the private sector. That in outline was the message to co-ops from Professor Yvan Allaire, the executive chair of Canada’s Institute for Governance to delegates at the co-op summit taking place in Quebec this week.

Yvan Allaire talked of what he called a “deep governance crisis” in shareholder-owned companies, where he said management had been driven by investor pressure to focus simply on immediate short-term returns. “Managers are motivated, some would say bribed, to work just for the interests of shareholders,” he said. The interests of other stakeholders in these businesses were being completely disregarded. Co-ops, he said, had to do things differently.

Mr Allaire, who is a member of the Global Council on the Role of Business at the World Economic Forum (Davos), is well-known in his native Canada for his writings on governance issues, and is also co-author of the recent book A Capitalism of Owners: how financial markets destroy companies and societies and what to do about it. He reminded his audience of how executive pay had risen steeply in recent years, so that top managers now could be earning 180 times the average wages of employees in their businesses. At the same time investors were holding shares for shorter and shorter periods of time. ” Read more