Corporate Board articles from November 2006

Corporate Board archives from November 2006

Expensive lessons on executive pay.
November 1, 2006... The past year has seen American corporations rocked by public outrage over soaring executive pay and stock option back-dating issues. Rather than trying to pass the blame or complain about new regulations, boards and their corporations should...

Trends for non-executive chairs and lead directors.
November 1, 2006... Though U.S. corporate boards continue to grow more independent, they remain of two minds when it comes to independent leadership. Support for and development of the lead director role is booming. The independent, non-executive board chair,...

Financial fraud--what directors need to know.
November 1, 2006... With growing penalties for (and tighter definitions of) financial fraud, the oversight role of the board's audit committee has never been more crucial. Yet does your committee know the most likely corners in which fraud will try to hide? Worse,...

Forming board special committees.(managing a sudden buyout offer or fraud at highest level of management)
November 1, 2006... The company faces a sudden buyout offer. Fraud at the highest levels of management is alleged. How does the board respond? By forming special committees to weigh such extraordinary situations, boards can shape a response that meets the highest...

The socially responsible board.
November 1, 2006... The concept of a board's "fiduciary duty" has been expanding and today includes a number of social, environmental and human rights issues that some boards may be ill prepared to oversee. What are these new corporate social responsibility...

Chief audit executives face many new challenges.(Audit)
November 1, 2006... Numerous challenges face chief audit executives trying to comply with various regulatory statutes, according to a survey conducted by ACL Services Ltd. and The Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA). The survey includes the perceptions of 858...

Major power shift underway in U.S. corporate boardrooms.(Compensation & Recruitment)
November 1, 2006... U.S. board directors have spoken: an increasing number of directors indicate that CEO pay is "too high in most cases," and they are not spending nearly as much time on shaping strategy as they are on monitoring, according to a study that...

Director pay posted double-digit gains in 2005.(Compensation & Recruitment)
November 1, 2006... Median total pay for directors of the 200 largest U.S. companies in 2005/2006 ranged from $195,000 to $210,833. This was an increase of between 8.1 percent and 12.4 percent, depending on committee memberships and roles, based on preliminary...

Shareholder support for social issues rose for the 2006 proxy season.(Corporate Responsibility)
November 1, 2006... Support for shareholder proposals on social policy increased significantly during the 2006 annual meeting season, according to a study of voting results by PROXY Governance, Inc. Based on available results through August 2006, more than...

SEC adopts its proposed executive pay disclosure rules.(Disclosure)
November 1, 2006... In July, the Securities and Exchange Commission voted unanimously to revise the disclosure requirements for executive and director compensation, related-party transactions, director independence and other corporate governance matters. The new...

Board members seem unconcerned over H-P's handling of board surveillance.(Liability & Litigation)
November 1, 2006... Ponemon Institute, which researches data privacy and protection issues, in September conducted a telephone survey of board members who serve on the corporate boards of U.S. publicly traded corporations. The purpose of the study was to determine...

Federal court decisions shakes up "proxy access" rules.(Shareholders & Investors)
November 1, 2006... In what could be the most significant corporate governance legal decision in more than a decade, a federal appeals court in New York in September rejected a long-standing policy of the Securities and Exchange Commission to permit companies to...

U.S. business leaders see global growth as opportunity, not threat.(Strategy & Finance)
November 1, 2006... Top executives surveyed in the Grant Thornton LLP Survey of U.S. Business Leaders view global growth as an important opportunity to expand their business. More than half (56 percent) of business leaders surveyed view globalization as an...

Books received.(Bibliography)
November 1, 2006... Green to Gold. By Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston. Yale University Press. $25. The ways environmental issues are reshaping corporate policy across the world are examined by two "Green Business" insiders. Though this examination of the...

Ten years ago in The Corporate Board.(Retrospectives)
November 1, 2006... I can tell you that in the case of Silicon Valley, the boards are an extremely important part of company management. The boards add a lot of value. The kinds of directors you want to get are on a lot of boards, connected, people who know what's...

Five years ago in The Corporate Board.(Retrospectives)
November 1, 2006... I don't think independence is that critical to being a good director. Instead, it's the ability of directors to fire management that's critical to us, rather than trying to ascertain whether they meet some independence test. --Mark Mobius,...

Articles & speeches.(Spoken & Written)
November 1, 2006... Is this what Bill [Hewlett] and Dave [Packard] would have done? Hewlett and Packard are no longer in a position to answer for themselves. But we do know that the two men always operated on trust and openness, but also with a strong hand. They...

Recent board elections.(Directors' Register)
November 1, 2006... 3M Company has elected to its board W. James Farrell, former chairman of Illinois Tool Works Inc. Allied Waste Industries, Inc. has elected to its board Stephanie Drescher, partner with Apollo Advisors, L.P. Apple Computer, Inc....

Joseph Grundfest: plugging boardroom leaks.(Conversations)(Interview)
November 1, 2006... The September boardroom controversy that rocked Hewlett-Packard Corporation put corporate governance failures in the public spotlight in a way not seen since the Enron meltdown five years ago. Yet the disastrous H-P investigation of boardroom...