The notion being promulgated by some here that it is acceptable and indeed typical for well-governed boards of directors to permit highly-paid CEOs to undertake active Chairman roles outside their core duties in companies undergoing substantial change and turbulence is totally incorrect.
It may be typical for a CEO to be permitted - subject to specific-case board consent - to undertake one or two passive non-Executive director roles outside the CEO space, but that is it. It is manifestly not appropriate conduct for a board to permit a full-time CEO to be paid as such and yet gain materially from an additional role that is of such complexity and time requirement that it necessarily requires many work hours and distractions away from the core CEO role. Good boards do not permit that type of ancillary commitment, period, and the reasons are obvious. To be _chairing_ a substantial public company that is (a) under siege from outside parties (b) dispensing with a number of top executives and directors and is (c) financially under performing and requires to raise new capital, etc is by any definition a major continuing time commitment/distraction and, in the case of JON's Echo role, is being financially compensated accordingly to the tune of roughly half the ARU CEO salary.
That the ARU board has permitted an abnormal indulgence of JO'N's obvious own financial and career aspirations outside rugby is both improper, yet wholly unsurprising. This is the ARU board that:
- permitted lengthy contract extensions to its CEO and national coach prior to the seminal rugby event that was meant to prove the quality of their national code leadership and coaching skill;
- offered such extensions without any form of proper open explanation as to their justification or necessity;
- permitted its CEO to attempt to hide his own remuneration from public disclosure despite such remuneration being effectively, directly and indirectly, provided by fans of the code in terms of viewership and gate income;
- permitted an alleged 'independent' review of RWC 2011 performance to be led by an active coach within that performance sphere and where such a review was to be staffed and approved only by ARU board insiders;
- permitted that review - so crucial to fans and supporters' knowledge of what went on/wrong - to never be published openly and transparently, but instead to be only partly leaked with obvious bias to selected 'compliant' journalists;
- allowed the RWC 2011 to be declared a 'pass mark' despite the ARU's 2009-11 pre-declaration that the Deans period would be vindicated by an outstanding Wallaby performance at this event;
- allowed Nucfora exceptional and free-ranging powers over multiple elements of national and youth coaching, player development, 'high performance' matters, etc, despite numerous failures at same but without any form of open analysis or justification of his performance for national rugby;
- permitted a major code-wide 'governance' review to be led to parties whose backgrounds had no correlation with direct experience of successful professional sporting organisations, or even of outstanding corporate governance standards;
- despite providing essential funding for all state franchises, stood by passively whilst numerous major state franchises were markedly and dangerously deteriorating in all of rugby quality, fan attendance, and core commercial viability and thus manifestly threatening the viability of the code in crucial geographic regions
......and so on.
The point being that the JO'N free rein to do largely as he wishes with his time irrespective of the cosmetic and substantive consequences for Australian rugby is little other than a manifestation of poor governance practices and unsound professional accountabilities at the heart of the ARU board as consistently practiced conduct over many highly important matters relating to rugby in Australia.
