Denise Cummins writes about what happened when Sears was run according to the principles of Ayn Rand. SPOILER ALERT: Chaos, followed by bankruptcy. Think Lord of the Flies in the executive suite. In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert decided to restructure the company according to Rand’s principles. Lampert broke the company into more than 30…
Tag: CEO
GE Whiz: If Only Flannery’s Ouster Was Unique
No one knows more about CEO succession — the good, the bad, and the very ugly — than Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld. He has some thoughtful comments on the second CEO within a year at GE. He insists it is not unheard of and makes the key point that there was a major turnover on the…
JD CEO’s arrest steps on governance landmine – Breakingviews
Emphasis added to this story about a “governance landmine” that illustrates the problem with governance structure that is overweighted in favor of the CEO. JD.com shareholders just got an abrupt reminder about their investment. Richard Liu, the founder and chief executive of the $45 billion Chinese e-commerce company, was arrested in the United States for alleged…
Narcissistic CEOs Can Mean Big Legal Bills | Stanford Graduate School of Business
At first glance, it might seem worth it for a company’s shareholders to tolerate a narcissistic CEO’s abusive personality, given the outsized success that Jobs and others like him have achieved. But narcissistic CEOs’ rampant hubris also has a serious downside, [Charles] O’Reilly notes. Studies indicate that they’re more likely to engage in questionable tax-avoidance…
What do companies really have to reveal when a CEO is ousted? – The Washington Post
Jena McGregor writes in the Washington Post about the delicate obfuscation in CEO departure announcements:<P Barnes & Noble’s announcement on Tuesday that its CEO, Demos Parneros, was being terminated, gave investors some important information: He would not get a severance. His firing was not related to “any potential fraud.” He had violated a company policy and…
FCA fines Barclays boss £640k over whistleblower failings – Citywire
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Relegation Authority (PRA) have fined the chief executive of Barclays £642,430 over his handling of a whistle blower. In a joint statement the two regulators announced the Barclays chief James Staley will be fined for his failure to ‘act with due skill, care and diligence in the way he…
The Lonely CEO | Directors and Boards
The significant conclusion we would draw is somewhat different: CEOs do not allow or enable boards to play a significant substantive role beyond compliance and window dressing, and boards make no effort to change that. Whether it’s racial tensions in a coffee shop or testimony before Congress about privacy, CEOs face a lot of pressure…
Time For Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg To Face Facts
Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld explains the failure of corporate governance at Facebook revealed by the Cambridge Analytica breach. We concur, and we call on the board to establish a committee to investigate further and report to Facebook users and investors about the steps they are taking to prevent further breaches. The leadership of Facebook is failing…
Misconduct Report Shaves $2 Billion From Wynn Market Value – MoneyBeat – WSJ
How should a board react to this? How can a board prevent it? The market value of dropped by $2.1 billion on Friday, beginning a slide shortly after The Wall Street Journal published an article citing a pattern of sexual misconduct by the company’s chairman and chief executive. Source: Misconduct Report Shaves $2 Billion From…
Gretchen Morgenson: 20 Years of Corporate Governance
In her last column for the New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson summarizes the best and worst and most improved of the corporate governance issues she has reported on, quoting VEA Vice Chair Nell Minow: Nell Minow is a corporate governance expert and vice chairwoman at ValueEdge Advisors, a firm that guides institutional shareholders on reducing…
