A push by corporate governance experts, shareholders and, in some cases, regulators to untangle the chairman and chief executive positions at U.S. public companies is gaining traction.The percentage of S&P 500 companies whose chief executives also serve as chairman reached 45.6% in 2018, compared with 48.7% the year before and the lowest percentage in at…
Tag: CEO
How Did an Auto CEO Keep his Illness a Secret From the Directors and Shareholders For a Year?
When someone becomes a CEO, he or she relinquishes the luxury of privacy, including regular updates to the board on health issues. If the CEO is important enough to be worth all of that money, then his or her health is a risk factor the board must be able to consider and plan for. The…
How a Buddhist monk turned CEO revived Japan Airlines from bankruptcy – Channel NewsAsia
A disastrous privatization led to bankruptcy. A CEO who was a Buddhist monk, took no salary, and made employees the priority turned it around. Mr Inamori, ordained a monk in 1997, may not have been a conventional choice, but he had a reputation for challenging common business practices and putting people before profit, a philosophy…
Column: This is what happens when you take Ayn Rand seriously | PBS NewsHour
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…
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…
