The Men Who Run Prudential

LONDON -- Management can make all the difference to a company's success and thus its share price.

The best companies are those run by talented and experienced leaders with strong vested interests in the success of the business, held in check by a board with sound financial and business acumen. On the other hand, some of the worst investments to hold are those run by executives collecting fat rewards as the underlying business goes to pot.

In this series, I'm assessing the boardrooms of companies within the FTSE 100 (UKX). I hope to separate the management teams that are worth following from those that are not. Today I am looking at Prudential (NYSE: PRU), the life assurance group that is going great guns in Asia.

Here are the key directors:

Executives
Prudential has no fewer than seven executive directors. The non-exec chairman and seven other non-execs just put the executive team into a minority, in line with corporate governance codes. It's something of an old-fashioned structure, with many FTSE 100 boards having just the CEO and CFO on the board.

Chairman Paul Manduca's appointment earlier this month was controversial. A non-exec since 2010, he was asked to lead the search for a new chairman after Harvey McGrath resigned in the wake of Prudential's failed 23 billion pound bid for AIA. A five-month search led to the appointment of Manduca himself.

Manduca was formerly CEO of several large asset management firms, but was not wholly uncontroversial. He quit as European head of Deutsche Bank's struggling asset management business in 2005 after a change of strategy.

Brain
A former McKinsey consultant, Ivory Coast government minister and European head of Aviva, Tidjane Thiam joined Prudential as CFO in 2008 and became CEO in 2009. He has continued predecessor Mark Tucker's Asia strategy with great success. Reputed to have a brain the size of a planet, he might still consider himself lucky to have survived the failure of the AIA bid which many saw as overambitious. He is to be the next chairman of the Association of British Insurers.

The CFO also joined from Aviva in 2009, with an insurance industry and professional finance background. The other directors have insurance, banking, business and public sector experience, and include heavyweights Sir Howard Davies, former chairman of the FSA, and Lord Turnbull, former cabinet secretary.

I analyze management teams from five different angles to arrive at a verdict:

Overall, Prudential scores 15 out of 25, a middling result within the FTSE 100.

The individuals have impressive credentials, but an almost-too-good CEO needs more to hold him to account than a weak-ish chairman and a board half of which owe him their jobs.

Buffett's favourite FTSE share
Let me finish by adding legendary investor Warren Buffett has always looked for impressive management teams when pinpointing which shares to buy. So I think it's important to tell you that the billionaire stock-picker has recently acquired a substantial stake in a prominent FTSE 100 company.

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