As investors and other stakeholders put increasing pressure on public companies to build boards that better reflect society, the root cause that inhibits board diversity has become clearer. It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s a network problem...
The COVID-19 pandemic transformed trends in CEO turnover. As it brought new risks to organizations throughout 2020, the number of CEO departures fell each quarter. And the trend continued alongside the pandemic in 2021, with the global annual turnover rate falling from 10% in 2020 to 8.9% in 2021....
Today’s boards face an increasingly complex business environment, an intensifying regulatory environment and growing activism by investors and other stakeholders. In response, they are focusing on their own composition and taking a strategic approach to director appointments...
Boards that convened more frequently landed better deals, and that effect was enhanced when a company had at least one female director—even more so with two. Having two directors with experience navigating a takeover was also linked to higher sale prices. And a board’s ability to negotiate higher ...
With this year’s proxy season in the rearview mirror, EY’s Center for Board Matters analyzed voting trends among Fortune 100 company shareholders to see what could be gleaned about investor sentiment. It found that investors are getting much choosier about the environmental, social, and...
The past year has brought many watershed moments in the world of ESG. In Europe, there has been added pressure on companies to tighten and enhance their approach to sustainability more broadly, without relying on the blanket term “ESG.” Meanwhile, in the United States, a high-profile and divisive backlash...
The WSJ Pro Research team of analysts looked over the structure and diversity of the boards of S&P 500 companies, finding growing ranks of diverse directors but also more disclosure about such diversity...
Most notably, there is a confidence deficit in the board’s ability to address key areas that appears to be growing. This widening confidence gap — increasingly evident in the year-over-year results — is only one key finding. But it’s a critical one. At a time when executives are looking for more input from their boards....
Search is a component of succession planning. A successful succession planning process will include a search to identify potential candidates and evaluate their suitability. However, “CEO search,” as used the way boards refer to it, relates directly to an emergency situation, such as the sudden or unexpected departure of the incumbent CEO....
Many boards and executive leadership teams have already embraced the premise that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives when done well can yield many benefits, from improved talent attraction and retention rates to better decision-making by inviting in more diverse perspectives...