Corporate Learning & Development

The King Code is South Africa's guide to ethical and effective leadership. It is not an Act of Parliament. It asks organisations to apply its principles and to account for how they have done so, and in practice it has become the yardstick by which boards, investors and regulators judge good governance. King V follows King IV, and many organisations are working through that transition.

Its strength is that it is about how an organisation is led and held to account, rather than box-ticking. Codes like it exist elsewhere, such as the UK Corporate Governance Code, the Mauritian National Code of Corporate Governance and the German Corporate Governance Code, and many ask organisations to apply the code or explain why they have not. Its weakness, when it is misused, is that it can become a document filed once a year. The Code only works when the board treats each principle as a question it must be able to answer.

This theme is about reading the Code as it was meant to be read: what each principle is asking for, and what applying it looks like in a real organisation.