Tag Archives: Board of Directors
New to the Boardroom? How to Succeed
image credit: Bigstock By Bob Vanourek Congratulations. You’ve just been invited to join your first public company board. Great. Now, what can you expect? It’s not just approving the CEO’s strategy or officer compensation recommendations after asking a few questions. It’s more than risk assessments, financial statement reviews, and meeting with the outside auditors periodically. It’s much deeper and more complex, especially if you want to bring a new brand of leadership to the boardroom. You will be confronted with difficult challenges you are not likely to have faced before. What do you do? When do you lead assertively? When do you lead softly? When do you follow? Who do you talk to for advice? How do you succeed? Based on years of experience with many corporate boards as a …Continue Reading
Blame Boards For Excessive CEO Pay and Perks
Compensation levels for CEO’s and C-suite execs took off like a rocket starting in the 1980’s. It was caused by the dual whammy of Milton Friedman’s “maximize shareholder value” maxim and the advent of the “leveraged buyout” focus from private equity firms. I should know because I participated in those phenomena as a CEO. The stock options I was granted during those years far exceeded the norms of option grants in prior decades as boards tried to “align” management’s financial interests with those of shareholders. There is nothing inherently wrong in private equity, stock options, in divesting unproductive assets, or delayering bloated companies. Those undertakings are a healthy part of marketplace adjustments, as long as they are done ethically and respectfully. But the C-suite financial gains that boards approved to, …Continue Reading
Does Your Board Have Your CEO’s Back?
One of the great scourges of our age is “short-termism.” A staggering 78 percent of CFOs and CEOs admit to sacrificing long-term value to achieve smoother earnings. Many decry this “suicide by quarter” mentality, but few CEO’s will be able to withstand the pressure to make the quarterly numbers unless he or she has the full, vocal support of the board. When the CEO and CFO conduct the conference call and get hammered by day traders or short sellers, and when the stock dips because the company didn’t make the whisper number the Street expected, what will the board do? Hide? Talk among themselves about whether or not the CEO will “make it”? If so, your CEO won’t trust your board. Without this trust, the CEO’s job is too …Continue Reading
Leading Board Members Who Aren’t Natural Followers
Guest Blog by John Balkcom The board chair by definition and by charter is assigned to be the leader in the boardroom. But board members, especially when selected well, are rarely known for their willingness to follow. What’s a board chair to do? Here are my recommendations based on years of service on both for-profit and non-profit boards. 1. Invoke “team up” instead of “man up.” As a guest speaker in a recent business school class on governance, I asked, “What does a group of guys usually do when they get together?” A young man in the back responded firmly, “Man up!” Then, I asked, “Okay, what does a group of women usually do when they get together?” A young woman in the front row asked quietly, “Team up?” The …Continue Reading
