As I have done for the past 25 years, I delivered a “Thanksgiving Day Address” in November. Thanksgiving is America’s secular holiday that glorifies our nation as a land of opportunity, of sharing, of plenty. This year my Thanksgiving address focused on “home.” In particular, I examined the images, impressions and emotions evoked by the question, “Where is your home?”For most of us, a home is more than a dwelling, and much more than four walls and a ceiling. It’s what we bring into a house that makes it our home, and “be it ever so humble, there’s no place like (it).” Whe...

Director, Great Plains Energy. And Senior vice president of human resources, Sprint Corporation What attracted you to Great Plains Energy’s board?Great Plains Energy (NYSE:GXP) is the holding company of Kansas City Power & Light Company (KCP&L) and KCP&L Greater Missouri Operations Company. The integrated, electric utilities operate under the brand name KCP&L and serve more than 800,000 customers in Missouri and Kansas. I live in the Kansas City metropolitan region and am a longtime KCP&L customer. I was familiar with the company and its strong reputation in the...

Can an aggressive pay-for-performance reorientation help businesses meet goals?By Stephen Charlebois, Michael Haimson and Rachel BenderA financial services firm with revenues in excess of $1 billion utilized a price-vested options approach with rigorous goals to align with the company’s high-growth strategy.The strategy was successful, and after the stock price nearly doubled by the end of the performance period, the CEO realized values in excess of 10 times what the value was when the options were granted to the executive. Introducing a “high-risk, high-reward” pay design that allo...

B Corps setting the standard for measuring SRI.Over the past decade, there has been a significant change in the way companies, investors and consumers think about the broader role business plays in society.The proposition is gaining acceptance that businesses should provide a benefit to more than their customers, employees and owners. The social-impact investing movement has focused attention on a broader role for corporate social responsibility, moving beyond merely avoiding pollution, child labor and other bad behavior.The “B Corp” movement — recognized as a driving force in the arena ...

Procter & Gamble Co.Initially it looked like Procter & Gamble Co. (P&G) shareholders rejected Trian Fund Management LP’s bid to put activist investor Nelson Peltz on the consumer products company board despite support from the top three shareholder advisory firms — Egan-Jones Ratings Co., Glass Lewis & Co. and Institutional Shareholder Services Inc.But in a recount, Peltz, according to preliminary results at presstime, narrowly won a seat. Peltz’s fund, Trian, which owns a $3.5 billion stake in P&G, had initially deemed the vote tally “too close to call” and Peltz...

Board diversity efforts continue despite pushback from some quarters.Racial and ethnic diversity in the boardroom doesn’t get as much attention as gender, but there’s a growing movement to focus more on these groups.But as with nearly every movement, there’s always some sort of pushback and the accelerating effort to broaden the base of talent and diversity on public company boards has created a school of thought — and accompanying research — that suggests age, ethnic and gender diversity in and of itself does not contribute to higher earnings, increased shareholder value and deeper ...

Cullivan is a senior vice president for business operations and CIO at ForeScout Technologies, Inc. Director for Axon.What interested you in joining Axon’s board?When I got the opportunity to interview for the board position, it quickly became apparent that to deliver on its people-based mission, Axon had to become a technology company focused on the cloud and artificial intelligence, with security a top priority. Many of the same opportunities and initiatives that I have been driving in high technology organizations applied directly to the transformation well underway at Axon. How did ...

Compensation committees need to consider impact on all employees.A mid-sized consumer products company introduced a relative total shareholder return (TSR) measure to its long-term incentive program. The company had an "all-for-one, and one-for-all" culture, so all managers in the organization carried that same relative TSR metric. After a few years of challenged market performance, several mid-level managers left the company, seeing their unvested equity values fall and having a general sense that their individual contributions were too distant to affect relative TSR.The lesson: Board decisio...

Is the check-the-box approach to board diversity a push in the right direction?The New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, together with New York City pension funds, launched its Boardroom Accountability Project in 2014, and it’s been reasonably successful.Now Stringer has his sights on boardroom diversity.The 2014 effort put pressure on public companies to give their shareholders the right to include, in the company’s own proxy statement, a shareholder’s nominees for director alongside the board’s nominees. Without this, shareholders seeking to elect a director who was not part of t...