THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW/Maura Quinn, IoD chief executive:THE STINK of Irish corporate scandals was still a faint whiff in April 2008 when Maura Quinn, former head of Unicef in Ireland, took up her post as chief executive of the Institute of Directors (IoD).
Representing company directors in a climate where even Brian Lenihan can declare that there are “too many incestuous relationships” in Irish business might seem like an unattractive task, but for someone with a resumé as impressive as Quinn’s, it’s easy to believe her when she says she enjoys it.
“It’s been a very frenetic time,” she admits, amid the lobby chatter of Dublin’s Westbury hotel.
She began by opening up the lines of communication with members, old and new, who find themselves increasingly in want of a lobbyist. The last six months has seen Quinn shift her focus to the “front-of-house work”. The latest target for deconstruction and negotiation is a document known as CP41, aka the financial regulator’s consultation paper on corporate governance requirements for credit institutions and insurance undertakings.
For Quinn, the “anomalies” include a “not very practical” recommendation that company directors be required to hold monthly board meetings and proposals – such as a requirement for the majority of boards to be made up of independent non-executive directors (NEDs), that will simply be rejected by the IFSC crowd, she claims. The phrase “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” enters the conversation.
Limiting the number of non-executive directorships a person can hold concurrently to five is unfair to professional NEDs, those who are not distracted by executive functions, and could reduce the pool of people available to the not-for-profit sector, she argues.
I might be cynical about this point were it not for the fact that Quinn has direct know-ledge of pro bono work. The legacy of her Unicef days means she has friends who do lend their services, free of charge, to the not-for-profits, while Quinn herself is on the audit committee of Irish Aid and is also a director of Kanchi, the organisation formerly known as the Aisling Foundation.
The regulator’s new fondness for tough talk is “a very natural instinct”, says Quinn.
“All of the corporate governance malfeasance examples over the last two to three years have led us to where we are today, and I think we are all, to some degree, all directors, culpable in this.”
Still, while it may be “understandable”, Quinn does not identify with blame culture.
“I think that people feel they want retribution at a purely basic level. They want somebody made accountable for this, but I think we also need to be very adult about this and we need to make sure there is due process,” she says. “From the IoD point of view, we’re more interested in looking forward.”
Indeed, the IoD has not been unduly concerned about distancing itself from the generation of directors who oversaw the collapse of the financial system. Last month, the organisation appointed Heather Ann McSharry, an independent director of Bank of Ireland since 2007, to its board.
“In terms of the person you are talking about, yes, she’s a member of the board of Bank of Ireland, but she’s also got great experience in terms of her own professional background and her own executive career, and has served on other boards. So we’re quite happy to have her on our board.”
Part of the IoD’s “looking-forward” strategy is its drive to market its professional training schemes, including a chartered director qualification, which will have been obtained by 150 senior executives by the autumn. It also operates a “boardroom centre”, where companies who are keen to avoid accusations of “crony capitalism” can source their independent directors.
When Quinn took charge at Unicef in 1996, the organisation was “broken”, she says. “That’s the only way I can describe it.”
She bided her time. In the first two years, there was just one management change, but slowly the new team built up around her. By the time she left in 2007, its combined state and voluntary contributions had increased 10-fold. Then, a Bush appointee became executive director of Unicef internationally, prompting a career rethink. In any case, Quinn had become “bored silly”.
But though she grows restless if she doesn’t feel like she’s “making progress all of the time”, she is patient with the pace of corporate change and optimistic on the perennial question of boardroom diversity.
“The gender one is the one that always comes up,” she says. A fifth of the IoD’s membership is officially interested in becoming a NED. But only 13 per cent of its members are women. Female NED candidates are, therefore, “a very small group”.
Such women are in demand from boards that make a conscious decision to have some female faces in the mix, and this “potentially creates issues around cross-directorships”, Quinn notes.
“Equally then, there are women who say ‘I’m interested in this, but I’ve never been asked’,” she says, and sometimes companies “say they’re specifically not interested in having a woman”. Why?
“They would say, well, it’s maybe a very male business,” she says. In that instance, the IoD will put forward everyone, male and female, who has the right skills.
“Sometimes, we’ll succeed in convincing them, sometimes we won’t.”
The time Quinn spent within the UN system – “where there are quotas for everything” – has convinced her of the downside of positive discrimination, and she sounds sceptical when I express old-fashioned support for affirmative action (albeit in the context of electoral candidates).
“It’s interesting. I’ve looked at it from both sides,” she says. “They have been very good at it in the Nordic countries, really good, because they’re very progressive socially anyway. But always just a part of me rails against the concept of quotas.”
In any case, the more formal IoD-led processes for sourcing NEDs will bring about more balanced boards, she is sure. “There was a study done a couple of years ago as to why women don’t get appointed to boards. One of the explanations was women don’t play golf, and I thought ‘oh God’,” she says.
Casual 19th hole invitations to boardroom sinecures are now increasingly rare, while people looking for the odd directorship to pad out the autumn days of their careers may find succession-minded boards are looking for younger blood.
“Ask him about the golf,” a friend said, when I mentioned I was interviewing the head of the Institute of Directors. It turns out there was no “him” and there are no golf outings at the IoD. These days, company directors – especially the banking variety – and Quinn herself are just far too busy.
ON THE RECORD
Name: Maura Quinn.
Position: Chief executive of the Institute of Directors in Ireland.
Age: 49.
Education: Studied law at UCD and marketing at the College of Marketing and Design.
Family: Is married to John and has two sons.
Interests: Is a "big cinema person" and loves to travel.
Something that won't surprise you: She is against "one-size-fits-all" regulation.
Something that might surprise you: She "absolutely loved" Iraq, which she travelled to while at Unicef. She was there three weeks before the bombing started in March 2003.
