California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and education leaders are urging the University of California to address allegations of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct by University of California Regent and radio mogul Norman Pattiz, nearly a year after several people said Pattiz made them uncomfortable in the workplace...

Lynn Tilton Founder and CEO of Patriarch Partners LLC I know how it feels to be falsely accused. I know how it feels to be pursued for seven years by an overzealous government agency determined — no matter how the facts cut against them — to pursue unfounded charges. I know because it happened to me.

Portland, Oregon, may soon be the first American city to take a legal stand against outsized CEO pay. In an explicit bid to reduce extreme income inequality, the city government is considering penalizing companies that pay CEOs many times more than average workers ...

Newly minted CEO Timothy J. Sloan offered few details about how the banking giant planned to change its ways. He repeatedly avoided answering questions about the scandal by citing an ongoing probe by independent investigators hired by the board of directors ...

Goals can be hard to keep. With a Personal Board of Directors you can set goals and have your co-members help you stick to them. A recent study by Susan Helper, Morris Kleiner and Yingchun Wang confirm the importance of having a small peer group to depend on in a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic....

Here’s a reason to spend more money at H&M: The fast-fashion retailer is closing in on gender equality. Women make up 58 percent of H&M’s board and 41 percent of its top leadership team, according to data released Tuesday by LedBetter, a new research group that tracks gender in leadership ...

Nearly 3 percent of S&P 500 firms have no women on their boards, according to a report released Tuesday by the nonprofit Catalyst and consulting firm EY. Twenty-four percent of S&P 500 boards have only one essentially token woman ...

Trust is the foundation of American capitalism. Many activist investors have damaged that faith. Through 2014 and 2015, the activist investor movement was picking up steam. Corporate boards were running for cover or capitulating to activist demands before they got into proxy fights. The media heaped adulation on activist investors. Bill Ackman graced the cover of Forbes with the moniker "Baby ...

As the New Year gets underway, the highest-paid CEOs of many large corporations have already paid themselves more than the average worker will earn in the entire year! By the end of the first week of January, the highest-paid CEOs had already made as much as their average workers will earn over 8 years. An analysis by Equilar, a consulting firm specializing in executive pay, found that on ...

Companies with this type of executive show higher returns by more than a third. Why aren't more companies hiring them? Fortune 500 companies with the greatest representation of one specific type of executive in management positions deliver return to shareholders that is 3 4% higher than for companies with the lowest representation. And yet, few companies rush to recruit these leaders. This ...

It's concerning that some board experts are balking about the newly proposed Cybersecurity Disclosure Act of 2015 that would require publicly traded companies to disclose, in their investor filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), whether any member of their board of directors is a cybersecurity expert. Rather than object to this recommendation, one would imagine that on ...

This week, the Center for Effective Philanthropy released a new study on the practices of foundation boards -- a project on which BoardSource had the opportunity to collaborate. The report is a straightforward report-out on responses from 64 private foundations about the composition and practices of their boards, which might prompt some to ask: So what? Why should we care how foundation boards ...

Microsoft is moving past the one-and-done model of gender diversity in the boardroom. On Monday, the tech company nominated two women to its board: Sandra Peterson, worldwide chairman at Johnson & Johnson, and Padmasree Warrior, former chief technology officer at Cisco . Warrior was reportedly considered for Twitter CEO, a job that ultimately went to the company's founder, Jack Dorsey, Fortune ...

Executive pay is a high-profile topic which almost everyone has an opinion about, and many believe the entire system is broken. But despite being well-intentioned, many suggested reforms may not be targeting the elements of pay that are most critical for shareholder value and society. The Level of Pay Much of the debate is on what I call a Level 1 issue - the level of pay. For example, in ...

By Judith Walls and Pascual Berrone Most often, corporate governance is thought of as a mechanism put in place to protect shareholder wealth from the claws of opportunistic managers. In this sense, the term corporate governance typically arises alongside phrases such as investor myopia, short-term goals, incentive alignment, financial crisis, and even corporate misconduct and accounting fraud ...

Companies that have more women and minority board members also see greater diversity throughout the business. "Dozens and dozens of studies show the benefits of diversity,” Brande Stellings, vice president of corporate board services at the nonprofit ...

For those who have been thinking that assessing a company's environmental, social, and corporate governance factors (ESG) is simply fluff, heed the lessons of Volkswagen. According to Howard Sherman, head of corporate governance business development at MSCI, "We have had concerns about VW for some time. [The carmaker's] corporate governance score [on an MSCI proprietary ranking] was already in ...

Are companies and their boards succumbing to short-term pressures from shareholders? That's the concern of Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, the world's largest fund manager with $4 trillion in assets under management. Fink personally wrote to all CEOs in the S&P 500 index last spring to warn them about trying to return money to investors through so-called "shareholder-friendly" steps like ...

Like any club, it takes a sponsor to "get in." Country clubs, professional associations and even a job requires legitimate references who know you. So too, for boardrooms. As board directors can impact a company's earnings, stock price, and decide who will be the CEO, getting into the boardroom requires qualifications, experience and yes, sponsorship; being endorsed by someone at the boardroom ...

The Securities and Exchange Commission just ruled that large publicly held corporations must disclose the ratios of the pay of their top CEOs to the pay of their median workers. About time. For the last thirty years almost all incentives operating on American corporations have resulted in lower pay for average workers and higher pay for CEOs and other top executives. Consider that in 1965, CEOs of America's largest corporations were paid, on average, 20 times the pay of average workers...

As an executive search advisor, I meet numerous talented women seeking a corporate board position. Many have the credentials, experiences, and qualifications but cannot seem to breakthrough that proverbial boardroom door. The women are featured in articles and honored at so many events like Women in Banking, Women in the Media, Women in Law, and from all the accolades and accomplishments, we are led to believe that the numbers at the top, leaders of major corporations, in all sectors are growing. But they are not. Only 24 women are CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations. In the boardrooms of these organizations ...

Elizabeth Dolan quit her job as a director at a public company in May. Then, she did something unusual: She told the world why. As the sole woman on the board of the activewear company Quiksilver, Dolan says she faced an unacceptable level of unconscious gender bias, as she described in a June blog post for Fortune and recently reaffirmed to The Huffington Post...

It's no secret that there aren't many women at the top at the nation's biggest corporations. There are just 23 female CEOs at Fortune 500 companies. That's not even 5 percent. It seems odd that corporate America still has such pathetically small numbers of women in its boardrooms. Women hold less than 20 percent of the board seats on the Standard & Poor's 500 index, according to the women's advocacy nonprofit Catalyst...