Snow White’s step-mother and directors share a predilection for [...] read more »

The message is on every US dollar and one might say, “Sure - but who else?” By the small hours of the morning on Sunday, September 28, the US Congress announced that a US$700 billion lifeboat was in the slips, ready for launching to save the economy. It sank by midday Monday. The United Sates Congress plus that beleaguered nation’s Federal Reserve and its Treasury Department returned to the table at once, seeking an answer, any answer. While even the Delphic Oracle cannot tell us what will transpire as the next few months or years unfold, there is one certainty: the rarest commodity in the market [...] read more »

In the team sport called corporate governance every director must play [...] read more »

Watch for the Red Lights 

In "Mischief of Many Sorts" I offered the view that rules are all very well but they follow the dictum of necessary but not sufficient. I concluded that piece on the issue of ethics and asked the question: "How should directors prepare for the sins they know will be committed?" Sound, strongly held ethics are the best defense, and if we could only be sure that they will always be in operation this page would be unnecessary - but it is.

A dilemma for directors is the fact that ethical behaviour is not simple. Not only does one have to know the right [...] read more »

  Once upon a time, in a land far away, or at least south of the 49 ^th parallel, the guys with the black hats grabbed the cash and rode out of town. Sheriff Paul Sarbanes and his deputy, Mike Oxley, sprang into action and, well, you know the rest. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, also known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002, is a US federal law passed in a hasty and somewhat controversial reaction to the corporate and accounting scandals that plagued corporate America at the turn of the century. It got its name from its two chief proponents, Senator Paul [...] read more »

As the Twig is Bent

Virgil said, “As the twig is bent so is the tree inclined”, just one of his many catchy phrases that achieved proverb status. Its essential wisdom has been the subject of everything from books to stage plays to human research, and I am borrowing it for the title of a few words on creating a company’s first board of directors.

 This site is primarily for those involved in smaller organizations but the task of drafting a one-size-fits-all profile for the directors of emerging companies is as impossible as it is for any of the others. That said, there are ess [...] read more »

  Writing a book is one of those wonderful events that reveal challenges in a progressive sequence, most of them totally unexpected. So it was with “Chairs and Tables: Corporate Governance for Small Business”, my most recent book, which was humbling in its revelations about what I knew, or thought that I knew, versus the truth of the matter. One of the first issues was the discovery that, although many had personal views and opinions, a generally accepted definition of corporate governance simply did not exist. I did a literature search, not of a scholarly quality but thorough enough to include [...] read more »