‘Decency does not make a career, success does’, said Morris Tabaksblat, former chairman of the board at Unilever. Tabaksblat set up a corporate governance code for blue chip companies which carries his name. He died of cancer last Thursday at the age of 74.

Managers may be successful but don’t necessarily have integrity, Tabaksblat maintained. His governance code was meant to prevent greedy managers from acquiring too many cushy jobs and treating themselves to large salaries.
Responsible governance
Tabaksblat himself was one of those successful managers. During his 35 years in business he had far too many commissionerships and in his last year at Unilever he earned the not inconsiderable sum of €5m. But after 1999, Tabaksblat became a champion of responsible governance.
In 2003, a series of financial scandals at Ahold, Shell and Enron prompted the then finance minister and present chairman of financial watchdog AFM Hans Hoogervorst, to ask Tabaksblat to come up with a set of rules for corporate governance.
Same faces
These included a maximum of five commissionerships and no more than four years in the job. Golden goodbyes could not exceed a year’s salary.
‘You keep seeing the same faces in the 125 blue chip companies’, said Tabaksblat who had to relinquish quite a few commissionerships himself under his new rules. The old boys network was unpleasantly surprised by the new code and said it would be bad for investment in the Netherlands.
The code, with its more than a hundred rules, made it nevertheless and the Netherlands now ranks high on the list of countries with the best corporate governance.