This is an all-star guide to the practicalities of corporate governance reform, and the only way to introduce it is through serious name-dropping. It pulls together opinions by former CEOs (Norman Augustine of Lockheed Martin and Bill George of Medtronic) and a current CEO, Robert Lane of John Deere; a former SEC chairman, Arthur Levitt; the current SEC head, William H. Donaldson; and leadership thinkers from major schools such as INSEAD, Yale, Wharton, University of Southern California, and Harvard. The book's editors are Robert Gandossy of Hewitt Associates, and Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, an associate dean at the Yale School of Management.
One of Harvard Business School's own, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, contributes several of the lessons on leadership that she conveyed in her latest book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End. Professors Scott Snook, a leadership expert, and Rakesh Khurana, author of a highly respected work on the excesses of CEOs, Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs, have joined forces to write about character development at a true pressure-cooker, the United States Military Academy at West Point.
All essays are organized into four broad subject areas: corporate wrongdoing (with writing by Enron whistleblower Sherron Watkins), the role of the leader, the role of the board, and reform. Though some of the remedies have been much-discussed elsewhere—a "governance checklist," for example, stresses the red flags of board overcommitment and excessive perks—they bear emphasizing. We agree with the thesis of the last essay by Susan C. Keating of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling: "In the new world in which we live, everyone's job is to be a corporate risk manager." This book explains how.