Womens Forum Day 1 first session
October 12, 2007 by Chris | permalink
The first person to take the theme was Anne Lauvergeon, Chairman of the Executive Board of Areva. She spoke about the relationship between the shareholder and the Board of a company. She indicated that this relationship is an important one. And often difficult unless there is a high degree of transparency; both in good and bad times.
Ayo Obe, chair, Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy from Nigeria spoke on the role of trust in African nations. She pointed out that there is a critical role of the citizen to make discerning choices. And, that this power of choice is not just in the way that officials are chosen, but in the way one lead’s their lives. She gave some examples from the current situation in Nigeria.
Q Is there a difference between popularity and trust?
Laura Liswood, Senior Advisor at Goldman Sachs NYC, response started with a short rhetorical dialogue regarding the CEO of Arriva who had opened the panel…
Do I trust her because I agree with her, or do I agree with her and therefore I trust her. Does it matter? She continued, noting that surveys show that there is a fundamental decrease in trust in government and other institutions today. This is across the board. There is an increase in trust of NGOs; even an increase in trust in certain armed forces in some parts of the world. There is a slight increase in trust of business….although this is a mystery to her. Part of the challenge today is the incredible amount of information. It has become too darn hard to discern between the ‘facts’ from the chaff. It has become so complex that one ‘throws up their hands’ and says ‘I like the colour of that guy’s tie, so I will vote for him’. And this is why representational governments in the older democracies is beginning to fail
It seems like democracy has a fundamental problem. As a system of representation it expects that there is transparency, and then as the individuals who are elected do not meet aall the expectations across ALL categories, then they loose their trust totally. IT takes years to build trust and just moments to loose it. She talked about what she calls her Crumbling Cliff Theory – when all else fails, when the cliff is crumbling beneath us, then a women is often shoved forward since nothing else has seemed to have worked. This is happening more and more and women are succeeding to keep the cliffs from collapsing.
She went on to talk about the issue of trust of institutions. It seems that women trust institutions more because they feel that they need the institution to provide them with a safety net. Men have the perception that they can be more self-reliant and create their own wealth. Women do not have the same feeling, in general, and this must change.
Q is the question of trust right for this conference???
Ayo – yes. It is really more about how we project ourselves.
Someone who has confidence must also have self-doubt. There is paradox. To take risks with both feet on the ground. You need to be able to look at yourself from outside. If you think about the 1960’s, there as an imposed political system. There is a totally different world today. Now, we need to make sure that we are able to ask ourselves very hard questions with honesty…perhaps this is the yin-yang of being able to push and pull.
Liswood – it is a combination of the two views. We need to be able to trust ourselves. ‘men feel that they are fully confident to make a decision when they have 25% of the knowledge, women feel that they can make decisions when they have 75% of the information.’
The summary : a few issues have come up
Self-doubt vs self-confidence. Risk vs consensus. And, a real big issues with the concept of openness in leadership by the few and the needs for transparency of the many.
The moderator concluded by stating:
We have to learn to love and embrace complexity.
