Corporate Board articles from July 2006

Corporate Board archives from July 2006

Majority voting and governance power.
July 1, 2006... Perhaps the most powerful governance issue of proxy season 2006 was the drive to require that directors be elected by a majority stockholder vote. Proposals seeking majority vote standards gained unprecedented support (and many majority votes),...

What should the board do when the prosecutor calls?
July 1, 2006... If your company faces a federal investigation, the board may confront difficult scenarios--indictment, or a cooperation deal with prosecutors that includes waiver of attorney-client privilege and the appointment of a monitor or examiner. How...

Best practices for documenting board meetings.
July 1, 2006... "If you haven't documented it, you haven't done it" has become powerful boardroom wisdom. Poorly-handled minutes and board records now come back to haunt corporations in courtrooms and regulatory actions. A "best practice" approach to...

Board communications in the Internet age.
July 1, 2006... Modern boards are too often trapped between old style board communication tools (slow mail and telephone) and the online age (insecure e-mail and clumsy websites). Yet the tools exist now to design easy-to-use, custom board web portals that...

Better decision making in the boardroom.
July 1, 2006... Why do many boards make such bad decisions? Maybe because the boardroom model itself is such a poor environment for effective collaborative decision making. Lack of engagement, politics, and weak governance structures all lead to poor...

Pressure is building to better align CEO pay with performance.(Compensation & Recruitment)
July 1, 2006... The drive for responsible executive compensation is showing results. Confounding the expectations of some observers, CEO pay changes last year were modest, and pay and corporate performance were closely aligned, according to the Mercer Human...

Corporate giving shifts focus to meeting overall business objectives.
July 1, 2006... Companies are aligning their philanthropy programs to meet overall business objectives and corporate reputation and branding needs, according to a report by The Conference Board. The report is based on a survey of 77 multinational companies...

Finance executives see benefits from outsourcing and plan more of it.(Strategy & Finance)
July 1, 2006... Contrary to published reports, a survey of top U.S. financial executives shows that American companies are not only pleased with the benefits delivered by current outsourcing efforts, they plan to do more outsourcing in the future. The same...

Global CEO turnover set a new record in 2005.(Strategy & Finance)
July 1, 2006... Global CEO departures reached record levels for the second year in a row, but may be peaking, according to the fifth annual survey of CEO turnover at the world's 2,500 largest public corporations by Booz Allen Hamilton. The study also found...

Ten years ago in The Corporate Board.(Retrospectives)
July 1, 2006... Whereas in the past the CEO was clearly the more powerful party, in the future he or she must share influence over board-related matters with the directors. Directors will have more control over the board's own activities. In a sense the CEO...

Five years ago in The Corporate Board.(Retrospectives)
July 1, 2006... Premature CEO replacement does not happen if a board is doing its job thoroughly and deliberately over time. Boards can no longer afford the luxury of paying attention to leadership effectiveness and CEO succession only on an occasional or...

Books received.(Bibliography)
July 1, 2006... Riding Shotgun: The Role of the COO. By Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles. $27.95. Stanford University Press. As business structures have become huge and globally diverse, the CEO's role has grown to be overwhelming. The need for an effective...

Articles & speeches.
July 1, 2006... With product innovation, it's a certainty that your competition is shortly going to copy what you've done. There will always be the next hot car and the next great high-definition television. With business-model innovation, if you can come up...

Recent board elections.(Directors' Register)
July 1, 2006... Allied Waste Industries, Inc. has elected to its board David I. Foley, senior managing director of The Blackstone Group, L.P., and Steven Martinez, partner at Apollo Management, L.P. AmerisourceBergen Corporation has elected to its board...

Frederick Rowe: fighting for director accountability.(Conversations)
July 1, 2006... Corporate boards have long found themselves in the crosshairs of shareholder activists and large institutional investors. What happens, though, when some of their strongest allies (and often fellow board members) rise up to demand change in how...