from Shareable Last week, Delaware initiated what is being called a “seismic shift” in corporate law by enacting benefit corporation legislation (Senate Bill 47). Unlike corporations whose sole purpose is to maximize shareholder value, public benefit corporations (PBCs) are for-profit corporations designed to work in a socially and environmentally responsible manner. From their creation, PBCs […]
Archive | Corporate Governance
JPMorgan Directors Feel Heat in a Vote
from NYTs As JPMorgan Chase’s annual meeting nears, much of the tension surrounds a critical vote to split the chairman and chief executive roles — a decision that could strip Jamie Dimon, the bank’s influential leader, of the dual titles he has held since 2006. Behind the scenes, though, another battle is brewing. Some JPMorgan shareholders are […]
HP Chairman Steps Down In The Wake Of Corporate Difficulties
from ars technica Hewlett-Packard Chairman Ray Lane stepped down on Thursday as the head of the historic PC maker’s board of directors following a mismanaged acquisition of software company Autonomy. As we reported in November, HP announced that an internal investigation had found “accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures” in the financial records of Autonomy, the unstructured “big data” analysis software firm […]
How Boards Can Hold Executives Accountable
from Forbes A corporate director’s role is one not of management but of oversight. Just as grandparents stay in the background while parents raise children, directors guide top executives from a respectful distance. One of the most direct ways that boards can guide executives is with effective compensation programs. Yet directors themselves often need guidance […]
Obama And Volcker Vs. Wall Street
from Forbes There was an amusement parlor in New York’s Chinatown where you played tic-tac-toe against a chicken, but the chicken got first move so unless you played flawlessly you could only draw against your feathered adversary. The expression “Politics leads economics” suddenly resonates. Our president’s health care initiative founders in the Congress. Massachusetts goes […]
The State Of The CEO In 2010
from Forbes How will this year be different for the chief executives of American corporations? To begin with, in 2010 the corner office will see a lot more visitors as the CEOs of public companies adjust to increased scrutiny from board members and, in some cases, the government. As chiefs settle into the new year, […]
Corporate Governance: Don’t Rush Reforms
from BW.com The last decade has been an economic perfect storm. Things got off to an unpleasant start with the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The Enron/WorldCom/Tyco scandals followed close behind. The past few years have featured the subprime mortgage crisis and the credit crunch precipitated by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. For equity investors pummeled […]
The Real Blindness Behind The Collapse
from Forbes “Too big to fail” is a new phrase in the American lexicon, born in the economic crisis that gave us a bankrupt Lehman Brothers and the shotgun marriage of Merrill Lynch with Bank of America. Nobody really knows what it means, except that somehow in the banking world, central bankers can decide that […]
The New ROE: Return On Ethics
from Forbes Growing up on a farm in Idaho, I learned some timeless lessons at an early age–that every day began long before dawn, that hard work was the rule rather than the exception. Those lessons are just as true today as when I first helped my family harvest our crop of seed beans and […]
He Doesn’t Let Money Managers Off the Hook
from NYTs EVERY once in a while, if only for sanity’s sake, it is wise to leave our bankrupt era behind and seek out a bit of wisdom from a moral authority. It’s a challenging exercise, given that so many formerly stellar reputations are now shipwrecked and that all those once-smart guys and gals have […]
A Chinese View Of Governance And The Financial Crisis
from Forbes Regulators struggling to fix the world’s troubled financial institutions may take heart from the experience of China’s large state-owned banks. In the late 1990s, Chinese state lenders were all but insolvent, with nonperforming loan ratios at many banks exceeding 50%. A decade later, China’s state banks have found their footing–and have managed to […]
New Year’s Resolutions For The C-Suite
from Forbes Happy New Year, leaders of corporate America. It’s resolution time. One: Get to the gym. Two: Spend more quality time with the kids. Three: Restore the firm’s reputation and return it to profitability. Wait. You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you? We learned a lot about our businesses’ leaders this […]
Blame Boards of Directors for Financial Mess
from CNN As big Wall Street firms topple like dominoes, there is plenty of blame to go around. Failure this broad and deep takes a village, and regulators, lawyers, compensation consultants, auditors, executives, shareholders, and the press all played a part. But the people who are most responsible for the massive meltdowns of these institutions […]
Is There Anybody Out There?
from Forbes Whence your new chief executive? From inside? Or from outside? This week’s change at the top of the two large U.S. mortgage agencies, Fannie Mae (nyse: FNM – news – people ) and Freddie Mac (nyse: FRE – news – people ), seems to confirm a management succession rule of thumb: Go inside […]
America’s Most Trustworthy Companies
from Forbes One needs to look no further than the collapse of Bear Stearns to recognize the importance of analytical techniques that can help investors identify companies with aggressive or risky accounting practices. For such advice, we have repeatedly turned to Audit Integrity, a financial analytics company headquartered in Los Angeles. As far back as […]