Radical incenses or inspires

By JULIE MIDDLETON

Executives and directors should not be allowed to own shares in the companies they run.

It takes their focus off delivering on promises and allows natural human greed to restrict their vision.

This is one of the views of maverick and wildly successful Australian business consultant Jonar Nader, and among those he shared with the audience at the Institute of Directors annual gathering in Auckland yesterday. Nader is visiting Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin on a tour aimed primarily at promoting his latest book, How To Lose Friends and Infuriate Your Boss: Take Control of Your Career (Plutonium, $39.95).

Nader, a professional contrarian and stirrer with a heavyweight business CV, says the very fact of owning shares - a loyalty-buying move on the increase in corporate life - is incompatible with directors' imperative to deliver to customers.

"Directors, when they are allowed to own shares, no longer remember their business. They face Mecca - Wall St - and keep checking share prices," he says.

"They remove their eyes and attention from the customer. Self-interest comes first.

"That is human nature. I'm not fighting the executives and saying that they're greedy.

"I'm saying human nature is this. Why deny Mother Nature?"

But Nader, whose sceptical nature and thinking was shaped by his childhood in war-torn Lebanon and the discrimination he faced after emigration to Australia, says he is not claiming the moral high ground.

"When I used to own shares, I was in the trap," he admits. "You defocus from what you're there to do.

"And you are there to do what you have promised to do" - whether that's make the best cars or the most delectable cheese.

The solution to the dilemma? "One of the things I have been telling directors is to remove the triggers" - removing equity from the remuneration equation.

Nader, who makes rather a fuss about revealing himself as 37, looks at the world by challenging it, turning it over. He says he does have respect for authority, but believes people don't question the accepted norms enough. And they don't challenge their own attitudes enough.

"We live in a abdicating society," he says. "The very fact we buy insurance proves abdication - 'I shall move the responsibility to someone else.'

"We tell our students to abdicate their education to a teacher, welfare to the Government, career to bosses, happiness to our lover - it's always someone else."

However much you admire someone working successfully in the realm of ideas - after all, behind every company is a great one - some of Nader's proposals would appear right off the planet.

One of them is his theory of "fluid shares" - a communistic idea that everyone in a company, from top executives to warehouse packers, should be paid the same, that figure arrived at by adding all salaries paid and dividing them by the number of workers.

Equal bonuses are paid monthly out of a profit pool. The premise is that everyone ought to benefit together, or be disadvantaged together.

Nader admits that "half an audience loves me and half hates me".

On balance, then, he should be quite comfortable. But many companies must find his provocations worthwhile: this week's appearance at the Institute of Directors event was Nader's second, and his client list in Australasia includes Microsoft, AMP, IBM and Johnson and Johnson.

And he doesn't come cheap: Nader's lowest hourly charges for assignments in his home town of Sydney average $11,600, according to his slick website www.logic tivity.com.

His latest book takes a fresh, and often controversial, look at issues such as careers, office politics, racism, pay and education.

University education gets a drubbing, with Nader suggesting it's a form of "adult kindergarten".

He terms networking futile, and lists the nine "diseases" he says are responsible for personal failure.

This is a condensed version of his musing on loyalty: "As an employee, your first loyalty is to your boss, regardless of whether or not your boss is deserving of your commitment.

"Even if you have to contend with an incompetent manager, avoid the temptation to treat bad bosses badly.

"It is not a question of the person or the personality, but one of position and office.

"Integrity is not something that can be applied selectively. Virtue is not a tool that can be called upon randomly.

"Honour is not a facade that can be erected arbitrarily. Loyalty is not a gift that can be given discriminatingly.



"If you allow another person's ethics to dictate your behaviour, you lack conviction. If you can be swayed by your manager's moods or values, you lack your own direction."

The book follows How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People - which drew a legal threat from the Carnegie Foundation, keeper of the similarly named self-improvement tome - and How to Lose Friends and Infuriate Thinkers.