Chairman-CEO Structure: Fortune 100 Leadership Trends and What You Can Learn from Them

Name: Chairman-CEO Structure: Fortune 100 Leadership Trends and What You Can Learn from Them
Rating: 4 (4 reviews)

Dora Vell · Robert Morison

Jan 2015 · Vell Executive Search Inc.

4.0

4 reviews

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About this ebook

How to structure the leadership of large corporations - and specifically whether to split or combine the roles of Chairman and CEO - remains an active and often controversial question.Under recent shareholder pressure, Walt Disney Company preemptively amended its corporate governance guidelines to require the board of directors to provide annual justification whenever the roles are combined, as they currently are. At Disney and an increasing number of major corporations, the board is obligated to revisit the structure question on a regular basis.One of a board's most fundamental responsibilities is putting in place the best leadership team possible, and there's no easy answer to the structure question. The trend is toward splitting the Chairman and CEO roles, as activist shareholders and corporate governance monitors generally prefer. But there are very successful companies with firm allegiance to keeping the roles combined. And less successful companies have compounded their business problems by changing the structure at each wrong turn.In order to cast new and up-to-date light on the question of whether and when to change the Chairman-CEO structure, we studied the experience of the Fortune 100 over the last decade and more. In this report we share our observations, conclusions, and recommendations regarding leadership structure, including the increasingly important role of independent Lead Director whenever the Chairman and CEO roles are combined. I hope you find this report informative and useful, and welcome the opportunity to discuss its findings and implications.

Ratings and reviews

4.0

4 reviews

Sal Y.

August 10, 2023

A good case study.

About the author

Dora Vell is the CEO of Vell Executive Search, a boutique executive search firm in Boston focused on recruiting technology executives and board members. Vell has successfully completed numerous board member and C-level executive searches, including CEOs, COOs, CIOs, and Vice Presidents - at both public and private companies.

Prior to founding the firm in 2005, Vell was a Partner at Heidrick & Struggles' Technology practice for seven years. Before her career in executive search, she worked at IBM for 11 years, managing software engineering organizations of 100 people and software sales organizations with revenues of $150 million. She has also served as an executive assistant to the CEO of IBM Canada for one year.

Vell holds seven worldwide software patents. She has published several Business of Leadership reports on governance and leadership and has been quoted in numerous articles including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, Fortune, Agenda Week, MSNBC, Mass High Tech, the OPUS for the World Economic Forum, Boston Business Journal, The Globe & Mail, CIO Magazine, and IEEE. She also has been a featured speaker on leadership at numerous conferences and at Columbia University's MBA program.

Vell is a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD), the Boston CEO Roundtable. She has served on the boards of Framingham State, Entrepreneur's Organization, Goodwill, and Mary Centre for developmentally handicapped adults, garage.ca, and RBC Capital Partners.

She has received an MBA from the University of Toronto, a Master in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, and a Bachelor in Computer Science from Carleton. She has also completed the MIT Entrepreneurial Master’s program.

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