What is driving the trend of corporate governance?

The fun part of this work is that people keep feeding you with ideas on megatrends. I recently met with strategy execution guru Jeroen De Flander (author of  "Strategy Execution Heroes"), who suggested me to have a closer look at corporate governance as a trend. For sure, corporate governance is on the agenda of plenty of companies. But is it a megatrend? Let's put it to the test:

• Is it long-lasting (5-10 years)?  It seems reasonable to assume that it is...
• Is it amplifying? There's certainly reasons to believe that more and more companies will (have to) adopt this practice, so yes;
• Does it have an impact, does it shift something? For sure, the move to corporate governance shifts business from some of the excesses it has adopted (due to various reasons). In other words: it does affect the notion of wild capitalism;
• Does it impact a substantial part of society? Well, arguably capitalism is governing a large portion of society right now, so anything that changes its nature would ultimately have an impact on society;
• Does it feel inevitable (not prone to fashion, tastes or lobbyists)? That's a hard one, but as my graph beneath shows, there are many factors and trends reinforcing companies to adopt corporate governance practices, albeit for their own financial interest.

So, in summary, yes, corporate governance a megatrend, and certainly worth monitoring. I've put it my my list. (thanks Jeroen.)

As an extra argument, here's an extract of an interview with the CEO of Pepsico and  the chairman of Accenture on the subject: