The new head of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), Lisa Osofsky, has wasted no time shaking up the corporate world she now inhabits.
She criticises institutions for being drawn from people with the same backgrounds: “We could be more diverse. What’s the impact? We are just getting one, homogenous group espousing points of view, we’re missing the options that might be out there.”
Leading by example, she says her own organisation will have a 50/50 gender split at senior board level from next month and she has also appointed non-executives from ethnic minority backgrounds.
Osofsky is herself an admirable example of what she’s talking about: that is, diversity bringing fresh thinking to bear on the way institutions do things.
She is an American whose experience as a lawyer with the FBI means she has a different approach to her job than her predecessors.
She suggests, for instance, that HMRC might work closely with the SFO in identifying cases that merit close investigation, since this is common practice in the US.
She wants to strike deals with offenders to persuade them to help investigations with inside information in order to avoid a prison sentence: this, too, is an approach she is familiar with.
She seeks a greater ethnic and gender balance in organisations such as hers, and indeed in politics and the law, so as to utilise the full range of talent and perspectives. As she says, if public and professional bodies recruit only people from the same backgrounds, “we are not getting the best decision-making we could”.
Her role is an exceptionally important one that bears directly on Britain’s reputation for probity.
She is a woman who is unafraid to question why things are done the way they are, and to try different approaches.
This is what corporate diversity is all about: getting new perspectives by recruiting able individuals from all backgrounds. We wish her well.
Farewell, Smithfield
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Smithfield Market, home to the meat market for some 800 years, will, confirms the City of London Corporation, be moved, probably to Barking , to combine with Billingsgate and New Spitalfields markets.
So meat, fish, fruit and vegetable wholesalers will be in one place. Billingsgate and New Spitalfields markets had already moved from their historic sites but the shift from Farringdon will remove Smithfield from the same site it has occupied for centuries.
These changes will be painful, just as it was to move Covent Garden market “where the costers cry” from Covent Garden to Nine Elms in 1974, and indeed Billingsgate from the original docks in 1982.
But Smithfield will have a new incarnation as the site for the Museum of London, whose location will in turn be a new home for the London Symphony Orchestra.
London is always in a state of flux and the great thing is to move with the needs of markets while ensuring that the historic buildings that housed them are preserved, as was the case with Covent Garden.
We hope that the City of London’s consultation on the site for the proposed move will attract wide debate and participation.
Marathon effort
The London Marathon is a triumph of hope, endurance and philanthropy over the forces of lassitude.
It is always an extraordinary event, which sees those in the very peak of physical fitness combine with the willing but podgy to entertain spectators from the comfort of their sofas as well as those lining the route.
It is an event that also raises an extraordinary sum for charity.
We wish them all well, and we plead with them to take care of their own wellbeing during this gruelling exercise.
Drink water sensibly as you go. And perhaps the mere spectacle will make the rest of us move that bit more, for the benefit of our own health.