December 19, 2011 – 11:14 pm
Private companies contemplating an IPO – and small caps debating whether it’s worth it to stay public – sometimes tally up the costs of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley, filing SEC reports, releasing earnings and so on. Now Ernst & Young has gathered data from 26 companies that did IPOs in the past two years to come up with an [...]
September 27, 2011 – 10:30 am
In the “things could be worse” category: Unless you work for Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo! or News Corporation, your company isn’t discussed in “The Worst Board in America,” a video by Thomson Reuters tech correspondent Peter Lauria. “There’s basically a race to the bottom. They’re all dysfunctional in their own way,” Lauria says of the trio of [...]
January 29, 2011 – 1:41 pm
As a non-lawyer I’ve wondered why so many companies – regardless of where they do business or actually are located – incorporate in Delaware. The little state that is barely a whistle-toot on a fast New York-to-Washington train ride practically makes an industry of playing host to corporations. More than 850,000 companies make their home [...]
September 10, 2010 – 8:19 pm
Effective corporate governance springs not so much from lists of rules as from the human element of relationships between boards of directors and top managers, according to a veteran director of companies such as Ford Motor and Estée Lauder. Irv Hockaday, former president and CEO of Hallmark Cards (and Kansas City Southern before that), spoke today at [...]
The CEO of Abbott Laboratories, Miles White, comments on the interplay between corporate strategy and long-term investor relationships in an August 6 interview with Investors Business Daily. Asked about ABT’s record of increasing dividends each year for 38 years, cultivating a diversified medical product line that lacks “pure pharma” sizzle, and following the slow-but-steady approach [...]
As the role of the CEO changes in 21st Century corporations, the mission of investor relations and corporate communications also evolves. These staff functions often support the chief executive in achieving success – or fall short along with the boss. We ought to take note of subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in the corner office. Cliff [...]
The Harvard Business Review offers a provocative thought in its April 2010 issue: According to two professors at overseas universities (which may be relevant), shareholders are not the owners of corporations – and boards of directors shouldn’t feel so compelled to make decisions in the shareholders’ interest. No, this isn’t an April Fool’s Day joke [...]
