One of the elements that make London Business School really sought after is the job opportunities. The internship between the first and second year gives students the opportunity to get their hands dirty in their dream job, learn something new, and hopefully convert it to a full time offer.

Not everyone in my class was looking for an internship though. There are students who either come from family business or are sponsored by their companies and some of them choose to use this time to travel or go back to their old employer. However for the vast majority, this is the time to iron those suits, shine those shoes and remain caffeinated throughout the day.

For students looking for consulting or banking, recruitment starts early – with the campus presentations that began around second week of January on campus. The unique location advantage of central London, the alumni strength and the school’s reputation attracts the best of consulting firms and investment banks to campus. Most students are focused on either consulting or banking, though there are a few brave souls who take a shot at both.

The entire process from the campus presentations, networking to the shortlists and the interviews leads to huge successes and some disappointments. It is undoubtedly a crucial element of the overall MBA experience. You see students reading up the vault guides and finance guides to recruit for investment banks. On the other hand, the consulting hopefuls are busy huddled up in meeting rooms cracking cases way beyond midnight. While a huge part of the recruitment is London focused, given the international nature of the school; companies from all over the world come to recruit at LBS. This year we saw companies from Myanmar as well.

After consulting and banking, the next big focus is on industry firms. For people focused on industry, internship recruitment begins slightly later. This means balancing interview preparation with classes, interviews with assignments and exams. The school allows students to have up to 3 offers and choose one or two. The flexibility of the program means that a student can do more than one internship.

Term three is the most relaxed term and I will share my experiences on that in the next post.

There are these ‘Big Idea’ sessions being run at the upcoming Global Leadership Summit. I’m looking forward to these; I think these could potentially be the most interesting sessions of the Summit. They’re covering topics such as future leadership, consumer influence, and the ‘practical priorities for practitioners and policy makers’ (have a look at the Summit programme for the full list of Big Ideas).

It’s this last Big Idea that I would like to discuss today. I don’t know what angle the panel will take on this topic. But I want to focus on the practicalities of legislation and regulations. Prior to London Business School, I worked as a lawyer in Wellington, the home of the Government and State departments in New Zealand (and it’s the coolest little capital in the world). In my time there I saw a lot of bills in progress and passed legislation come across my desk. It never really surprised me if new legislation was over a ream of paper thick, though I admit I didn’t enjoy the subsequent period of trying to decipher the new legislation.

I looked at legislation covering a broad range of topics, from tax through to climate change. Inevitably, they all read like pick-a-path novels, where you would constantly flip back and forth between pages, referring to other sections cited. Often I would end up with multiple fingers in the pages holding open various parts of the Act.

This legislation created in New Zealand is nothing unique. All over the world, and here in Britain, policy makers are creating these Byzantine laws that are becoming more and more difficult to understand. As a result, it takes teams of expensive lawyers, accountants, and consultants to pore through these tomes deciphering what was intended. Even with these teams of experts, it’s often difficult to decide what is allowed and what is not.

But do the policy makers realise what they are creating? The politicians who stand up in parliament and spout media friendly sound bites make their policies sound so simple. And they are relatively straightforward propositions at that stage. Then reality sets in when these policies are handed to legislative writers to create and these sound bites are turned into thousand page epics. Do these politicians ever then pick up these Acts again to understand the monsters they’ve created? I suspect not.

There are often good reasons for these Acts to be so complex. Legislators want to avoid loopholes and cover off every eventuality. As businesses innovate and these new loopholes become apparent, even more additions to the legislation are required. This is how tax laws have become so frustratingly large. Or it may be that while a concept sounds relatively simple – carbon credits for example – the practicalities of setting out how it actually works are overly complex.

So is there a solution? Some law firms have moved towards ‘plain writing’. Perhaps legislators could adopt some of these writing principles. That would be a start but it certainly wouldn’t be the solution; it wouldn’t resolve the pick-a-path nature of these Acts.

Instead, I imagine a world in the future where legislators write executive summaries, draw diagrams, give examples, and include quotes from policy makers in the Act itself. Already this is happening in some jurisdictions where bulletins supplement the Act and are interpreted as law (for example, the Tax Information Bulletins issued by the NZ Inland Revenue Department).

Alternatively, legislators could make the principle of the Act clear – keeping the Act short and readable by the majority of the population (think something like an expanded upon version of the 10 commandments) – and then leave it for the Courts and people’s judgment to decide what is correct. Many lawyers and businessmen would be up in arms at the ambiguity created. And this is exactly the reaction that this approach should create – if you are falling into the grey area of the law, then chances are you shouldn’t be doing it (but the law won’t stop you immediately if you are prepared to take test the boundaries).

These two approaches would be a drastic change from convention – a word that that legislators romanticise over. But in the world we now live, the excuse that it has always been done that way should no longer be acceptable. Business people are used to reading executive summaries, not thousand page documents. And they say a picture is worth a thousand words; I certainly have found diagrams useful in understanding various concepts.

I don’t think either of these approaches are perfect. But they do start to deal with the practicalities of business. Something that seems to have been forgotten about by policy makers in Britain and many other places around the globe.

I look forward to the discussion of this Big Idea at the London Business School Global Leadership Summit.

One of the topics being discussed at the upcoming LBS Global Leadership Summit is the demand for big businesses to think beyond the needs of their shareholders and for them to become responsible world citizens.

Recent world events certainly demonstrate the backlash that can occur when companies appear to put profits ahead of people. Companies, such as Primark, who had their products manufactured at the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh came under the spotlight when the building collapsed, killing hundred of workers. BP also felt the heat after its Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and leaked millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. And Foxconn’s practices in China have dragged Apple’s name into discussions of corporate social responsibility (CSR).

CSR initiatives can act as a good publicity campaign and PR for a company. Many companies donate a percentage of profits to charities or offer employees a day to work for a charity. While these initiatives may send warm fuzzy feelings to employees and consumers, are they actually having much of an impact? No doubt the receiving charities very much appreciate the donations and the good publicity probably helps companies bottom line. But these types of CSR initiatives are not going to stop oil spills, factories falling down, and employees jumping from windows.

So what does it mean to be a good world citizen? I think it is taking into consideration all your immediate stakeholders: your shareholders, employees, contractors, suppliers and customers. But the web of stakeholders doesn’t end there; it should include anyone and anything who is and could be impacted by your business. For example, BP should have been considering the families, the wildlife and the environment along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico who would be at risk from an oil spill.

As you can see, the list of stakeholders can quickly grow. And when you start thinking of possible worst-case scenarios, the list continues to multiply. A multinational company would need to take into consideration a vast number of people and possible outcomes, some who might actually never be affected by the company. Put simply, for a multinational company to be a good world citizen is a Herculean task.

Then, even when a company tries to get it all right, it can still go horribly wrong. Tesco supposedly had rigorous checks on its suppliers but that didn’t stop products being tainted with horse meat.

Perhaps then, CSR initiatives by a company are like an insurance policy – not just for the company, but for all the stakeholders involved. Ideally you would insure against every eventuality, but the premiums are too high and so you must be pragmatic in what you insure against. So too, a good corporate citizen can’t be expected to stop all risks, especially the most remote, from occurring. There will be some things that slip through the cracks. When you’re a multinational company with innumerable activities happening, it’s only a matter of time before something happens that your CSR initiatives haven’t covered.

The most difficult question then is, what level of insurance (or CSR initiatives) should a company take? Not all companies want to be world citizens. And who should decide that level – the company itself, an industry body, the regulators, or consumers?

I’m looking forward to hearing these questions being addressed by the CEOs of Unilever and Deloitte UK at the upcoming LBS Global Leadership Summit.

Perhaps if the banks had undertaken some more CSR activities, or the regulators had insisted upon them, the global financial crisis would have been prevented from happening.