Meeting the education and development needs of members as part of a commitment to help members be knowledgeable and maintain their relevance in today's markets

Corporate governance is manifested as an external, outside-in rules and regulations to legislate the corporations whereas human governance is an inside-out values-based conviction to guide the human where human is viewed essentially as a non-material soul and embodied in the physical being rather than as machine. Being parameter-driven and rule-based, corporate governance emphasises the letter of the law unlike human governance which is about the spirit of the law.

As the leading segment of society, business has become the most powerful force for positive change in the world today taking over the role of governments. Decision-making process of business now must take into consideration human well being and the interest of the people.

For business corporations to assume this role is never easy since conflict can arise between serving the self and the public. History shows that the original corporations were actually regulatory agencies such as guilds or local governments and had nothing to do with profits. But, over time, events such as the formation of “joint stock companies” and the court’s decision to grant legal person status to corporations have resulted in corporations being incapable of commitment to a community or any other undertakings that could diminish its profits.

Rather unfortunate too, free market fundamentalists further exacerbate the situation by arguing that for corporations to pursue any other goal besides profit-maximisation, would disrupt the market ecosystem.

This is when the presence of human governance will help corporations to make decision that will benefit us, society. Human governance can take us back to the original intention of the corporation, homing on values that should be upheld during decision making. The fact that corporate scandals have taken place only further endorses the benefits of human governance. And the fact that, reactionary corporate governance measures have not managed to impede further disgrace only tells us that we have nothing to lose by upholding human governance.

The corporate world cannot do without it. But to start with, we must first believe that we need and want to move on to a different dimension; that we need and want to transform our mindset. There must be corporate will akin to the imaginal cells that are responsible to morph a caterpillar into a butterfly.

We need to nurture those imaginal cells to transform corporations into the entities of knowledge-based economy. Everywhere people are talking about transformation, but is their transformation REALLY transformation or is it just about fiddling at the peripherals, analogous to quantitatively moving from 3 to 4 decimal places? We need to move to the cause of accounting failures, addressing the human who somehow manifest as if they do not want to be accountable. We need to address the issue of integrity in the stewardship of corporations. But for transformation to take place, corporate players need to reequip themselves with the right knowledge: that which includes the subjective besides objective.

To the accountants' fraternity, with human governance in place, the essence of the true and fair principle becomes less rhetorical. Therefore, from the bigger picture, human governance will improve human well-being. The individual business organisation too, as implied by Ritscher (1985), "can increase fun, productivity and resiliency" by including spirituality, an essence of human governance. Fred Kofman (2006) in his book titled “Conscious Business: How to Build Value through Values” also believes that a conscious business fosters personal fulfillment in the individuals and mutual respect in the community; and sustainable success in the organisations.