Owning Up: The 14 Questions Every Board Member Needs To Ask

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The subprime mortgage caught many financial service giants unaware, and reached far beyond trading desks all the way to their boardrooms. Indeed, despite their best efforts to govern properly, boards of directors throughout almost an entire industry missed a critical issue, and compounded that problem by not having robust succession planning to stem the crisis. Can boards do better? This books answers with an emphatic, Yes! Some boards are already doing all the right things.Leadership guru Charan describes the best emerging practices for boards--with real examples of how some of the best in the business solve today's thorniest boardroom problems. Charan helps readers determine whether their boards are owning up to governance by asking the most vital questions, including: Does our board act with the understanding that shareholders, analysts and the media will look to it (and not just the CEO) if performance is sub-par? Is this board more effective than the competitors'? Are we behaving as if we own the business to make money for the long haul? How do we deal with imminent threats to the business? Do we know who our next CEO will be? Are we paying for the performance we're getting? How do we keep the board evergreen?

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Ram Charan is a highly sought-after advisor to corporations, boards, CEOs, and senior executives in companies ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 500, including GE, Dupont, and Colgate-Palmolive. He also has an inside perspective as a board member for Tyco, Austin Industries, and a diversified Indian corporation. He is also author of What the CEO Wants You to Know and Know-How and co-author of Confronting Reality and The Leadership Pipeline, and writes a highly-regarded column for Yahoo! Finance. Charan has taught at the Harvard Business School and the Kellogg School of Northwestern University. Table of Contents Foreword by Jack Krol. What Boards Need Now. 1. Question 1. Is the Composition of the Board Right for the Challenge? 2. Question 2. How Are We Addressing the Risks that Could Put Our Company over the Cliff? 3. Question 3. Are We Prepared to Do Our Job Well When a Crisis Erupts? 4. Question 4. Are We Well Enough Prepared to Name Our Next CEO? 5. Question 5. How Well Does the Board Own the Strategy? 6. Question 6. How Can We Get the Information We Need to Govern Well? 7. Question 7. How Can Our Board Get CEO Compensation Right? 8. Question 8. Why Do We Need a Lead Director Anyway? 9. Question 9. Is Our governance committee Best of Breed? 10. Question 10. How Do We Get the Most Value out of Our Limited Time? 11. Question 11. How Can Executive Sessions Improve the Ownership Function of the Board? 12. Question 12. How Can Our Board Self-Evaluation Improve Our Functioning and Our Output? 13. Question 13. How Do We Stop from Micromanaging? 14. Question 14. How Well Prepared Are We to Work with Activist Shareholders and Their Proxies? About theAuthor. Index.