As companies continue to deal with the repercussions of the financial crisis, finding directors to fill the seats on many public company boards is becoming more difficult. In fact, in its 2009 U.S. Board Index Spencer Stuart found that 48 percent of  respondents to its survey said it took three to six months to recruit [...]

If you are a director or a provider of director education programs, like The Conference Board Governance Center, The Directors’ Network or the NACD’s Corporate Directors Institute, you may be trying to figure out what to make of RiskMetrics’ decision to discontinue its director education accreditation program as of March 1.
For director education program providers, [...]

The second wave of post-financial-crisis regulations (let’s not forget the elimination of broker discretionary voting that was effective Jan. 1) comes just in time for the 2010 proxy season when the SEC’s new enhanced proxy disclosure rules go into effect Feb. 28. While they won’t have the impact of “Say on Pay” or “Proxy Access,” [...]

As President Obama continues to propose more stringent bank regulations in light of the financial crisis – a hefty tax on 50 of the largest banks and a plan to allow regulators to limit the size and scope of those banks’ risk-taking activities (Read press release, Jan. 21) –  it’s hard to imagine those gaining [...]

As almost every U.S. public board continues a post-mortem on the financial crisis, many are looking for sobering answers from their own. And one director who has been making the rounds is Bill George, former Chair and CEO of Medtronic and director of Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil who is a professor of management practice at [...]

The FDIC’s decision Tuesday on a new insurance premium model for banks falls in line with what many are saying about executive compensation: It makes sense to tie executive compensation to risk alignment.
Specifically, the decision reflects some of the tenets of the G-20 and The Conference Board Task Force on Executive Compensation executive compensation principles.
The [...]

As part of my required reading during the first full week of the New Year, I can’t help but notice how many Top 10 board issue lists there are. And when I think about how critical 2010 is to the future of U.S. businesses and the recovery from the current recession, I realize how important [...]

There have been some developments on the executive compensation research front at The Conference Board. First, we have updated our Task Force on Executive Compensation Web site to include information about endorsing the Guiding Principles and secondly we have just this week released our Key Findings for the 2009 Top Executive Compensation Report.
The Top Executive [...]

While many of my posts have focused on corporate governance reform and executive compensation, I thought it made sense in the new year to touch upon an issue all public U.S. companies will have to deal with sooner than later: international financial reporting standards.
A piece in the December edition of CFO magazine (IFRS: Convergence vs. [...]

A recent online discussion on good corporate governance I had with members of Dan Swanson’s Yahoo corporate governance discussion group I belong to got me thinking. It’s a good time to start looking at what thought leadership there is on corporate governance principles.
There is quite a lot of good white papers, articles and online discussion [...]