Category : Corporate Governance

Fiduciary duty is a phrase that lives comfortably in the language of finance. Directors are told, correctly, that they owe a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the company and its shareholders, to exercise reasonable care and diligence, and to

Visit five active sites belonging to the same construction company, in five different states or regions, and you will very often find five different versions of the same organization. The permit-to-work process might be rigorously enforced on one site and treated as a

Ask most directors what ISO 9001 and ISO 45001 certifications mean to their company, and the honest answer, more often than not, is a marketing asset — a badge on a tender document, a line in a sustainability report, evidence to a client

A quality management system audit report is, in most boardrooms, one of the least scrutinized documents that regularly crosses a director’s desk. It arrives with an air of technical authority — dense terminology, reference codes to specific clauses, a summary conclusion stating the

Every serious crisis inside a construction or infrastructure company arrives with the same peculiar quality: in hindsight, it looked obvious. A cost overrun that should have been flagged eighteen months earlier. A safety incident preceded by three near-misses that were each individually explained

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a construction site when something is wrong and everyone can feel it, but nobody says so out loud. I have stood in that silence more than once — at a concrete pour where

Somewhere in my second decade in this industry, I sat through a compliance training session where a young company secretary walked us through a new SEBI disclosure requirement using a slide titled “Checklist for Compliance.” I remember thinking, even then, that the word

I still remember the first board meeting I sat in as a director rather than as the engineer presenting to the board. For twenty years, I had been the person walking into that room with a project update, a set of drawings, and

Ask most boards where they expect financial fraud to originate in a construction company, and the answer usually points toward procurement, subcontractor billing, or executive-level related-party transactions. Few boards instinctively think about the site store — the shed where cement bags, steel reinforcement,

Every construction professional I know carries a private list of mega-projects they study the way a surgeon studies a case gone wrong — not for entertainment, but because the failure teaches more than a hundred successes ever could. Over twenty-three years, mine has