Where Directors Hang Out
from September/October 2008
by Colin Leinster
Let’s welcome the 400 or so men and women who this year began their first-ever service as members of public boards. One of them appears on our cover, retired four-star admiral John B. Nathman; he signed on for a tour as a director of Curtiss-Wright Corp., which makes high-tech products for the defense and aerospace industries.
Enlisting Pentagon alumni isn’t unusual for such companies, which need the expertise these bigwigs bring to the boardroom, and in fact we have written about it. But the class of ’08 includes many rookies with a far from traditional background—or gender or race, for that matter. (See “First-Time Directors Rev Up”). A lot of newcomers are recruited to fill a specific committee berth—and not necessarily on a low-profile committee. Recently that has meant the audit committee, but not any longer. The headline of our story on the subject says it all: “The Comp Committee Takes Its Turn on the Barbie.”
The continuing controversy over CEO pay and whether or not it’s excessive will keep those coals glowing for the foreseeable future, I suspect, and the need to fill these committees with people who can understand the complexities of a typical CEO contract is acute. That explains the new movement to recruit human-resources experts onto compensation committees. The barbie heat is fiercest under comp committee chairmen. Take a look at those in the hot seat at 50 top companies. Read the numbers carefully; to me it looks like many of these companies are getting good value out of their CEOs.
In “‘The Issues That Chinese and U.S. Directors Face Are Very Similar’”, a number of board members and other business leaders give their impressions of a visit to Beijing and Shanghai, put on by our sibling company, Global Navigation.
These different stories illustrate a major service Corporate Board Member provides for its readers: It gives you a place to hang out. The articles, along with others in this and previous issues, invite you to share boardroom experiences, discuss challenges and solutions, learn and teach, and sometimes just meet one another.
Our conferences provide similar services, of course, as does our website, which offers an enormous range of valuable boardroom know-how, including webinars, pieces written for us by lawyers and consultants, and a forum where directors can talk among themselves. In addition, you’ll see in a couple of the stories in this issue that we’ve flagged spots where readers can go on our website to find further information about a particular subject. For new directors, incidentally, the entire site offers opportunities to get a jump-start on all kinds of director knowledge based on the experience of your peers and other experts.
We are indeed an excellent place for all directors to hang out.
