This mornings news that Angela Ahrendts is to leave Burberry to work for Apple is presumably good news for Angela, her family and for Apple. However her successor Christopher Bailey will bring to 98, the number of our FTSE 100 companies with a male CEO. This is a very depressing statistic which acts as a sharp reminder of the target for gender balance on company boards set by Lord Davies of Abersoch in 2011. There is a BBC news report here which provides a background to this idea. He proposed that boards in the FTSE 350 should aim to achieve 25% female membership by 2015, and things were already looking very shaky in May when a review of the sector looked in some depth at the gender balance across the corporate sector. If the ship is already giving the appearance of being irreparably holed below the water line, now might be a strange time to be adding to the challenge being handed to those who can be bothered to bail out the bilges. However a few days ago a new study was published, looking at the extent to which our corporate sector embraces sustainability in their activities. This report reviewed 300 European companies and concluded that unless the board included a champion for sustainability, no matter how good the intentions of the board as a whole, that they will struggle to achieve their objectives. The report concluded that only 18% of these organisations include someone who was able to remind the board of their good intentions and hold them to these when difficult decisions need to be taken. My final straw for this horse designed by a board is a reminder that just over 10 years ago (January 2003) Derek Higgs reviewed our corporate sector and proposed that boards would be a great deal more effective if they drew in, as non-executive board members, people who came from a background other than the corporate world from which the majority of board members come.

There seems to be a trend, that various commentators are agreed that the effectiveness of our ‘publicly’ owned businesses would be improved if the boards were more reflective of society at large and better shaped by the priority of sustaining the planet on which the business depends for its resources and market. The equal and opposite trend seems to be a resistance or reluctance to take on board these ideas. It is clear that even if none of the FTSE 100 companies had a female CEO, the lights would still stay on. However before we get to that stage are there any companies willing to go for broke and embrace Davies, Higgs and the Sustainability report in one go and really shake up their board in an attempt to show investors they have a business that is willing to learn from others?