Dr Michael Aldous, business historian at Queen’s University, Belfast, said leading a major utility company was a complex role, with chief executives responsible for both long-term strategy and the day-to-day running of the business.<\/p>\n
He said CEOs had to balance commercial performance, customer service, environmental responsibilities and regulatory requirements, while making major investment decisions that can take decades to deliver results.<\/p>\n
Often, he said, CEOs are no longer in post by the time improvements start to materialise.<\/p>\n
“It’s like thinking about politicians working on short-term electoral cycles,” he said.<\/p>\n
“They’re operating in an environment where they have relatively short periods of time and a lot of pressure on them to improve short-term outcomes.”<\/p>\n
Aldous, who grew up in Bradford and co-authored The CEO: The Rise and Fall of Britain’s Captains of Industry, said an extra payment made during a difficult year may reflect the board’s desire to retain Shaw.<\/p>\n
“They believe that although there are performance issues and difficulties, she is actually doing a good job to address this and they believe in her strategic plan,” he said.<\/p>\n
“But clearly that’s going to create a narrative that is problematic when it’s presented publicly.”<\/p>\n
For people like Crawford, the thought that Shaw was “doing a good job” was of little comfort.<\/p>\n
“If Nicola would like my bank details, I’ll take a few percent so I can continue to pay my bills [due to] being unemployed because of her company’s lack of ability to do stuff,” he said.<\/p>\n
“1% would probably do me for a little while, to be honest.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr Michael Aldous, business historian at Queen’s University, Belfast, said leading a major utility company was a complex…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":681988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-681987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/681988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}