Leadership’s Future: Accountability
by Miki SaxonWork hard, work smart, climb the corporate ladder, get tight with the right people and you could grab the brass ring—a director’s seat on one (or more) boards.
Money, prestige, power, respect—the hallmarks of leadership.
Responsibility—lots of it, especially if you are an outside director.
Accountability—not so much.
Consequences—rarely if at all.
Most of the outside directors serving on boards for companies such as AIG, Bear Sterns and Lehman Bros. moved almost immediately to other boards.
No muss, no fuss, no accountability, no consequences.
“In too many cases, the radioactivity of a board member of a collapsed company has a half life measured in milliseconds,” said John Gillespie, a longtime Wall Street investment banker and the co-author of “Money for Nothing” (Free Press), a recent book on corporate boards.
Rakesh Khurana, a Harvard Business School professor specializing in corporate-governance issues, says there are legitimate questions surrounding these boards. “When selecting individuals to oversee an organization, what criteria should we be using other than their previous performance on a corporate board?” he said. “If there’s no accountability here, then what is the system of accountability?”
Makes you wonder exactly what “fiduciary responsibility” means these days—let alone what it takes to breach it.
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