At a recent lecture series for Company Directors we were informed that regulation is on the rise and Company Directors in many countries did not even have the same rights as most international human rights standards dictated.

Trivial rights, such as a presumption of innocence. Wow.

All the while, the level of regulation we must be more than just aware of is out of control and growing by the year with incremental legislation.

And that is just for your day job/s. If you want to do the right thing and also contribute to a Not For Profit (NFP) the story continues.

NFPS have - 

- 170 different sets of legislation and regulation to abide by

- 19 different regulating bodies

- up to a further 74 more bodies who may be required to be involved.

This is just ridiculous.

And all the while we are experiencing record unfair discrimination claims and record unemployment, I wonder if those two are related. Of course they are.

It is no wonder the Private Equity model is winning around the world in the war for talent, why work for a listed company and get beaten around by shareholders on salary and regulators on legislation and salary. Go work for one of the top PE firms and know that your peers will be leading specialists and the owners are focussed on progress not scared of compliance.

Unfortunately this is happening and technology is only making it easier, so hopefully the regulators will realize the error of their ways, that will take years though and for the time being we are stuck.

OK, so the examples above are in Australia. But the reality is more and more we are expected to take responsibility for the actions of our companies across borders - internationally - and technology or trading companies in particular see this from startup phase when they are least prepared or resourced to handle it.

So the obvious thing to do was to ask our local Institute of Company Directors (the AICD) ...

'What are you doing about international alignment of principles for legislation and co-operation with similar industry bodies overseas?'

The answer was ... silence ... then (paraphrased) 'well that is a good idea'. You bet it is and they should be on top of these international demands on directors already.

OK, so maybe I am being harse but this education and lobbying is the self declared role of company directors associations and we pay a pretty sum for it every year. I expected better, that is probably a more appropriate comment.

With all the web 2.0 tools around now, we don't need to wait for lobby groups to eventually represent us or for professional associations to realise they often are not meeting the needs of their constituents. 

Most/many of these professional bodies still have very poor or limited feedback mechanisms anyway. Wow, email that doesn't get replied to, how very 1995. Lets not mention uservoice.com or getsatisfaction.com or how to decide between them using compete.com let alone twitter.com or linkedin.com groups!

So while we wait, the world moves on and company directors need a forum to discuss this stuff. So now there is one - The Company Directors Group on LinkedIn was set up this week, and on twitter we are using the hashtag #icds the I stands for International. 

Let the conversation begin.