Excellence in the Boardroom: Best Practices in Corporate Directorship

Considering the Enron fiasco, there's no better time than now to consider how boards can improve the way they govern. William A. Dimma, a Canadian veteran of fifty corporate boards and forty nonprofit ones, describes how boards ought to be run, as well as how they often are run in the real world, and his balanced perspective lends credibility to this timely and touchy topic. He discusses how to assess and select directors, avoid conflicts of interest, separate responsibilities, and grapple with sticky compensation issues. In between the practical commentary Dimma shares a few war stories that will have all board director-readers nodding their heads in empathetic agreement. Overall, the prognosis for boards going forward is positive, writes Dimma: "Fine-tuning may sound like an avoidance of larger issues, but it's not. For most organizations, it's all that's needed on a continuing basis."