An important development driving companies to consider and embrace corporate social responsibility ("CSR") initiatives is the potential for stronger engagement with customers, an increasing number of which are seeking out products and services that address stakeholder needs, such as health focus or environmental responsibility or...
A number of researchers, including Joseph Bower, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great”, have argued that companies perform better when they appoint insiders as their CEO. However, the problem that many companies face when it comes...
A “budget” has been defined as a plan for the coordination of resources and expenditures covering a definite period of time. While a budget can be created for the management of non-financial resources, such as manpower, the term is typically used in connection with the...
The traditional “business plan”, which generally ran anywhere from 40 to 60 pages, has been criticized as a waste of time and effort when trying to raise capital from investors. Many have argued for an emphasis on describing the steps taken to identify and execute...
Organizations must have a method for measuring the sustainability of its business practices. Companies are used to measuring financial results; however, it is only recently that focus has turned toward the development of tools for non-financial measurement of sustainability. Larger organizations with sufficient resources are...
The traditional “business plan”, which generally ran anywhere from 40 to 60 pages, has been criticized as a waste of time and effort when trying to raise capital from investors. Many have argued for an emphasis on describing the steps taken to identify and execute...
In their 2008 article in the Harvard Business Review, Gottfredson et. al. noted that from 1999 to 2006 the average tenure of departing chief executive officers in the United States declined from about 10 years to slightly more than eight. A 2006 survey by the...
A White Paper issued in 2013 by the Corporate Laws Committee (the “Committee”) of the Business Law Section of the American Bar Association (the “ABA White Paper”) reported that since 2010 a number of US jurisdictions had adopted provisions “allowing corporations to opt in to...
Common practice has been for recruitment and selection of new board members to be left either to the CEO or to a small group of directors on a nominating committee who meet only during that period of the year when the bylaws require that directors...
During the startup stage founders are primarily focused on what is immediately in front of them and have little time or patience for considering what might need to be done to build capacity among the members of the board of directors. While this is not...