the power of yes

LovelockI'm a lawyer. A lawyer has to do a lot of things he doesn't approve of. The members were after the windfall, that's what they wanted – a few thousand pounds. And yet the absurd thing is, most of them got that windfall in the form of shares, which they didn'teven bother to cash, so that when the resulting bank went bust, they lost everything.Once Bradford and Bingley became a bank, I remember taking an immediate dislike to a new non-exec who said, 'I want one thing from this company.' He said, 'What I want is regular, incremental growth.' In other words, he was saying, 'This company must grow every year.'Now we all know that nothing in the world shows regular incremental growth. You know that. I know that. But in the stock market they rip out the profit and bugger the future. The majority of investment isn't handled by individual investors – who can be bothered to look in the paper every day to see how their shares are doing? No, it's handled by fund managers, who are driven by quarterly figures. Every quarter, they have to prove they're doing better than other fund managers or else the client will take their money away. So fund managers are looking at businesses and demanding more and more money out of them.I mean, there came a moment when you could smell the corruption. This was madness. If you said to a taxi driver, how would you like it to be a condition of driving your taxi that each year you pick up more fares than the year before, he would tell you you were off your head. And yet the people who engineered this madness – people who lent 125 per cent of the value of a house – refuse to admit they did anything wrong.If I tell you the HBOS accounts run for 200 pages… and 28 of these pages are about corporate governance – oh yes, the remuneration committee has sat, the correct number of women have been appointed, the appropriate checks and balances are in place. It's all box-ticking. It's like a ship which you're being told is in apple-pie order, the decks are cleaned, the metal is burnished, the only thing nobody mentions, it's being driven at full speed towards an iceberg.