America’s Longest-Serving Director Welcomes Reforms
from
What Directors Think 2003
by Bonnie Azab Powell
It’s not the existence of corporate scandals that bothers Eric Nord—it’s their greater frequency. “There never was a golden age,” he says. “There have always been tycoons who did dishonest things that had disastrous effects on the people who trusted them. But they used to be few and far between. Nowadays there’s a new case in the paper every week.”
Nord’s thinking may not differ much from that of many other directors—he also decries the “obscene” compensation packages that various chief executives have made off with—but his views carry an impressive perspective. He’s America’s longest-serving director, according to the Corporate Board Member database, with 62 years of boardroom service under his belt. Now 86, Nord joined the board of privately held U.S. Automatic Corp., an automotive-parts manufacturer, in 1941. The lucky-genes club played a role in getting the 24-year-old engineer his directorship; his father ran the company. But he earned his keep—and indeed, after six decades and a corporate name change (to Nordson Corp., which makes precision dispensing systems that apply coatings to semiconductor packages), he’s still there.
Nord served as the outfit’s CEO and chairman from 1974 to 1983, when he retired as CEO. In 1997, at 80, he relinquished the chairman’s seat. But he remains a director of the Westlake, Ohio, company and serves on its compensation and governance committees. Nordson, which trades on NASDAQ, earned $22 million in fiscal 2002 on sales of $648 million.
Long before Sarbanes-Oxley and other reforms imposed such requirements, the majority of Nordson’s board were outside directors—“out of common sense,” says Nord. But he accepts that some companies may need a regulatory nudge. “That way you can avoid some of these situations where the committee plays dead while the CEO or another officer goes wild with self-granted pay raises,” he says. Yet no amount of regulation will stop crooked CEOs: “It’s the job of the board to stay vigilant. You just have to be careful whom you hire.”
Nordson is the only public company whose board Nord has served on. He’s devoted what spare time he has had to civic groups. For example, he chaired the city council in Oberlin, Ohio, where he lives with his wife of 55 years, Jane, and was a trustee of Oberlin College. He remains a director of the Nord Family Foundation, which dispenses several million dollars each year to the likes of the Oberlin Early Childhood Center.
Civic consciousness has slowly disappeared, Nord believes, which may explain some of the corporate scandals. As he says, “If CEOs and directors would keep in mind that they have a tremendous responsibility not just to their own shareholders but also to the public, we’d be in good shape.”
Some advice never gets old.
