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Many companies aren’t prepared to replace underperforming CEOs

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Re: Many companies aren’t prepared to replace underperforming CEOs

#251
post #237

Having had interactions with board members at 2 Fortune500 companies I worked for, I have pretty much lost faith in the "board members reflect the shareholders and manage the executive team" model. In one case, the board member said that the only material about the company they were ever given was carefully constructed/managed by the CEO/executive team and was not detailed enough to support any critical analysis of e…

for the uninitiated, could you list a few examples when board members (directors) were held responsible? famous court cases?

The biggest case I know about is Enron. IMO, it seems like they are obviously liable, but I expect they were pretty strongly manipulated by the CEO:

    https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CPRT-107SPRT80393/pdf/CPRT-107SPRT80393.pdf
I personally have not looked into this very much, but the difficulty of recruiting active, competent members for the board of directors was mentioned often by 2 directors I knew.

edit: Thinking more about this, I think that the difficulty recruiting directors with related competence came from a fear of Sarbanes-Oxley laws and “imputed” conflict of interest complaints for the prospective director. In practice, SOX could be really difficult.

Re: Many companies aren’t prepared to replace underperforming CEOs

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plenty of middle-managers could do as well as the average CEO. I’ve worked with several CEOs and countless senior executives, both at very large companies and small, who had varying degrees of competency. I don’t think this is generally true. Being successful at that job entails a specialized skill set that is rarely evident in middle management. What you are “managing” at the most senior levels of large organizati…

Can you elaborate what those skills are in your view? Meaning no disrespect, your current comment sounds like a hand-wavy opinion with zero actual justification.

He specializes in handwaving posts with no solid content. Look at his database posts for example where he's wasted a lot of people's time.
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