Jill Conway joined Nike’s board of directors in 1987 and exercised significant influence over the development of the company’s social responsibility commitments and programs through her leadership of the board’s corporate responsibility and sustainability (“CR&S”) committee, which was formed in 2001 with Conway serving as...
When deciding on which governance instruments should be created and implemented a point of reference is helpful. For companies with securities listed on public securities exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq the obvious point of reference are the listing requirements of...
In my last post I discussed some of the ways that companies contemplating an initial public offering or a possible acquisition by a larger firm (so-called “pre-IPO/pre-acquisition companies”) can use strong corporate governance practices, particularly readiness to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (“SOX”),...
While the primary focus of the well-publicized and sweeping corporate governance reforms adopted over the last decade, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (“SOX”), obviously has been public companies, elective compliance by privately-held companies with certain provisions of SOX can provide them with significant...
While it is widely believed that startups need outside capital in order to grow and survive, many of the fastest growing new businesses in the country—60% of the companies on the Inc. 500 list in 2015—have been launched using “bootstrapping” techniques with less than $10,000...
When the discussion turns to “organizational culture”, or “corporate culture”, most people have some sense or recognition of what the concept means, at least to them. A fairly simply definition, or explanation, is “the way we do things around here”. However, not surprisingly, there is...
Lean manufacturing, often referred to simply as “Lean”, has been described as a business model focused on efficiently delivering high-quality products or services to customers in a manner that ensures value by identifying waste within the value stream and eliminating it whenever possible. While practitioners...
Many sustainable entrepreneurs talk about working to improve the "common good". Well, perhaps that mindset is the best way to approach developing and implementing stakeholder-focused standards for their businesses. In a previous post, we discussed the argument of Garriga and Mele´ that it was possible and...
In order for directors to understand the scope of their responsibilities with respect to overseeing sustainability and determine how to best focus their energies, an assessment must be conducted of the issues, risks and opportunities that are material to the company’s operations, environment and communities. ...
Garriga and Mele´ suggested that it was possible and useful to create a classification of corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) theories based on the perspective of how the interaction phenomena between business and society are focused. They argued that CSR theories could be classified into the...