The board of directors is a group of expert individuals responsible for overseeing the management of an organization. (Shutterstock) While many of us can name a handful of CEOs, identifying directors serving on the boards of those same organizations is probably more challenging. The work of directors, whether they hold volunteer or compensated positions, is rarely publicized, and when it is, it is rarely good news. Indeed, corporate scandals often prompt public scrutiny, focusing on the board’s role and questioning how directors could have overlooked issues or been complicit in questionable or ..read more

Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick has blocked Elon Musk’s US$55.8 billion pay package, which Tesla’s board of directors approved in 2018 through a process she found to be “deeply flawed.” No CEO of a publicly traded U.S. company has ever been paid this much for one year’s work, according to Equilar, which tracks corporate leadership data. Pay for the 10 highest-paid executives, including Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook, reportedly maxed out at around $250 million in 2022. The Conversation asked Justin P. Klein, the director of the Weinberg Center for Corpor ..read more

Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin bowed to the inevitable on Monday and resigned as chief executive of Australia’s second largest telecommunications company. Why inevitable? Poor communication and a lacklustre response during a major system outage is bad enough. Then things got worse when Bayer Rosmarin and the director of Optus networks admitted at a Senate hearing on Friday they had no disaster management plan for the kind of national outage experienced two weeks earlier. Someone was always going to have to take the blame. Now, two critical questions emerge. First, will the resignat ..read more

Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin is set to front a Senate inquiry this week, probing last week’s colossal outage which left millions stranded without internet or mobile phone connectivity for a staggering 14 hours. The company has faced severe criticism for its handling of the outage, including for its lack of urgency in updating the public. Loss of trust and confidence aside, if the national outage has taught us anything, it is there are real dangers in leaving the management of critical national infrastructure to a 100% privately owned company, in this case, a subsidiary of Singapo ..read more

Lolostock/Shutterstock A reputation can be damaged by a single mistake, or after months or even years of bad behaviour. Organisations may turn a blind eye to such behaviour by employees or business leaders, and sometimes it is tacitly enabled by a toxic culture that prioritises an end game – profits or “winning” – over people or planet. In either case, research can tell us about the drivers of reputational loss, as well as how to rebuild a reputation, and ways to avoid damaging it in the first place. But while reputations can be protected, my research shows this shouldn’t happen at all costs ..read more

Achieving greater transparency and accountability in democratic governance and in capitalist economics must occur simultaneously. shutterstock Secrecy has become as important for corporations as transparent and taxable profits used to be, according to Raymond W. Baker in his new book Invisible Trillions. Global capitalism, he argues, operates beyond the rule of law. This contributes to extreme inequality that threatens liberal democracy. Deals in the financial secrecy system account for half of global economic operations. This is far beyond illicit transfers of funds through corporate under-pr ..read more

“I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg told the 11,000 staff he sacked this week. But does he really? The retrenchment of about 13% of the workforce at Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, comes as Zuckerberg’s ambitions for a “metaverse” tank. The company’s net income in the third quarter of 2022 (July to September) was US$4.4 billion – less than half the US$9.2 billion it made in the same period in 2021. That’s due to a 5% decline in total revenue and a 20% increase in costs, as the Facebook creator invested in his idea ..read more

Twitter may soon be without the benefits – or the problems – of a public board of directors. A-Digit/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images After a wild ride, it looks like Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter may be back on. Twitter’s board of directors had sued the Tesla billionaire in July 2022 when Musk tried to terminate the US$44 billion deal. The board has yet to drop its lawsuit, with a trial still scheduled to begin Oct. 17, 2022, which was intended to force Musk to complete the buyout. The board has in fact been at the center of this saga since the beginning, when Musk launched h ..read more

There's a void of responsible leadership at Hockey Canada and other scandal-plagued organizations. Governments can't fix those systemic problems. (Shutterstock) The Hockey Canada scandal has sparked anger and outrage. Many argue the Canadian government should take action. We saw similar cries for action with the major Rogers service outage in July 2022. And when Laurentian University sought creditor protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act in 2021, the Ontario Auditor General was called in. When things go south, we all want a remedy, and it’s easy to ask the government to step ..read more

Twitter will soon be without the benefits – and problems – of a public board of directors. A-Digit/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images It appears Twitter’s board of directors finally warmed to Elon Musk’ hostile bid and agreed to a sale – but not before it took a severe beating from the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and other prominent users on their own social network. Musk, who on April 25, 2022, sealed a deal to buy Twitter for US$44 billion, criticized board members for owning almost no shares of the company they oversee. Dorsey, who will step down ..read more