Where's all the fun gone?

Non-executive directors are more independent and harder working than before. That is
no guarantee that they can do a better job
Special report 2004/03/18
AS RECENT power struggles at Shell and Hollinger International have amply shown, well-
organised and determined non-executive directors can be a powerful force to improve
corporate governance by reining in over-mighty chief executives. In most rich countries,
efforts are under way to make that force more reliable. Better governance, it is argued, comes
from making non-executive directors more independent and giving them more work to do.
But actually, that is only part of the answer—and has drawbacks. Much the most important
change is to find ways of encouraging non-executive directors to behave independently. And
that, perhaps surprisingly, turns out to be easier than it sounds.
Jobs for the boys
Being a non-executive director—as opposed to a board member who is also part of the
company's management—used to be a lovely job for distinguished folk with a little time to
spare. A retired chief executive, a politician whose career had run out of steam, a lawyer: a
seat on a company board was a way to boost earnings and earn modest distinction. That
cosiness changed with Enron: in the intervening years, regulators in most rich countries have
placed new demands on directors. Directors themselves are more aware of the risk to their
reputation. And, by common consent, the mood on boards is different. Non-executive
directors take their task more seriously than ever before.
Of course, that is not true everywhere. The scandal at Parmalat is a reminder that there are
still large companies in developed countries where the old regime has survived. The
company's board bulged with members of the Tanzi family and bigwigs from Parma. The
company opted out of a law that demands that listed Italian companies have independent
directors on the board. Before the scandal broke in December, Parmalat's practices had put it
at the bottom of Italian peers in a governance rating issued by Institutional Shareholder
Services, a group that promotes good governance.
Tighter laws, properly enforced, will stop chief executives packing their boards with their
chums and putting insiders in sensitive spots such as the chair of the audit or remuneration
committees. But increasingly the focus is on what happens once governance reforms have
been implemented. Will company boards really be more independent? And will companies be
better run as a result?
Undoubtedly, one impact of the tougher post-Enron environment has been to make boards
take their duties more seriously. They are meeting for longer and digging much deeper.
Directors have begun to demand better information, and companies are starting to provide it.
This is not always a boon: directors find themselves with vast piles of reading matter, but say
plaintively that, if they asked for less, they might miss something important.
One result of this more serious approach is that directors put in longer hours. “Does it take
time? You bet it takes time,” says Bill George, a recently retired chief executive. “It's
complex to run a big company.” Korn/Ferry International, a firm of headhunters, regularly
surveys directors of big companies. Its latest report found that the time they said they spent
each month on board matters, including preparation time, attending meetings and travel, had
risen from 13 hours in 2001 to 19 last year. British outside directors claim to spend even
longer on the job: a hefty 25 hours a month.
Where does the time go? According to a recent survey of 249 directors of Fortune 1000
companies by Mercer Delta Consulting and the University of Southern California, 60% said
they spent more time on board matters in 2003, with 85% spending more time on their
company's accounts, 83% more on governance practices and 51% on monitoring financial
performance.
There are other signs of their increasingly serious intent, as in a study of 300 or so large
companies in Canada by Patrick O'Callaghan & Associates and Korn/Ferry. It found that
80% of boards had governance committees in 2002, as opposed to 69% in 2001; 49% of
companies detailed non-audit fees paid to external auditors, up from 24%; 72% of firms
include shares in directors' pay; 95% have only independent directors on their audit
committees, up from 89%; and 89% have only independents on their compensation
committees, up from 77%.
For some boardroom veterans, all this comes as a shock. Lots of older directors, observes
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale University's School of Management, “are bewildered if not
resentful” about the time now devoted to corporate governance.
Others are setting up offices to help them cope with the pressure. Betsy Atkins, a venture
capitalist and professional director who sat briefly on the board of HealthSouth before that
troubled company's woes became fully apparent, employs a staff of four, including two
qualified accountants and a market researcher. Consultancy and law firms are eager to help
other directors with their burdens.
One reason directors take their duties more seriously is that they have begun to realise the
perils of getting it wrong. Ms Atkins abruptly left the board of HealthSouth because it
became clear that the unrolling scandal there meant that her Directors' and Officers' (D&O)
liability insurance had become invalid. Plenty of directors of more solid companies may be in
that situation already without realising it, says Ralph Ferrara of Debevoise & Plimpton, an
American law firm. He makes directors' flesh creep by saying to them, “If you can't get
$100m of non-rescindable independent-director liability coverage, you shouldn't be on the
board.” Practically nobody, he adds glumly, can get such cover. This will not surprise the
independent directors of Equitable Life in Britain—they are being sued for up to £3 billion
($5.4 billion) for apparently failing to question the chief executive's reckless policies.
Who's in charge?
A more serious approach to the job is not the only change. Boardroom committees and their
chairmen now have more power, and especially the big three: the audit, nominating and
compensation committees. Chart 1 shows how American directors themselves think they are
doing.
The main burden of monitoring management more closely falls everywhere on the audit
committee. In some American companies this committee, rather than the chief financial
officer (CFO), now hires and fires the external auditors—and pays them too at the best
companies (though out of company funds, of course). Auditors agree that this makes it easier
to do a tough audit: management is more hesitant about pushing them to make fine judgments
on awkward issues. But the strengthening of the audit committee, if done clumsily, can send a
hostile signal to executives: that the board thinks managers may misbehave.
The audit committee has more power, but it also has a larger workload. In 1999, says
Korn/Ferry, the typical audit committee of a big American company met four times a year;
now it meets five times, and has a growing number of telephone meetings too. The meetings
are longer; the piles of papers to be read in advance are higher.
Another problem is that audit committees are evolving into mini-boards. As a result, the
respective roles of the audit committee and the main board may become confused. There is,
says Sue Frieden of Ernst & Young, a new triangle: auditors still have to work with
management to get the information they need, but they now report to the audit committee. Jay
Lorsch, a Harvard Business School professor who sits on, or advises, several boards, argues
that one of the principal duties of the audit committee and its chairman is the management of
these delicate relationships.
The nominating (or governance) committee also has more sway. Five years ago, says Dennis
Carey of Spencer Stuart, another firm of headhunters, the chief executive was the client for
95% of the searches that his company conducted for outside directors. The nominating
committee was a rubber stamp. Now, he says, the nominating committee is the client in over
half of cases. Other search consultants report that the nominating committee increasingly
signs the search firm's invoices and conducts at least the first round of interviews.
A key perk of the boss—controlling membership of the board—is thus slipping into the hands
of independent directors instead. Quite right too, says Nell Minow, a campaigner for better
corporate governance, who warns would-be directors to beware of being hired by the chief
executive if they want to be considered truly independent. “If the CEO makes the phone call,
you've got a problem,” she says.
The compensation or remuneration committee has also gained in stature. Some, such as
Charles King of Korn/Ferry, even argue that these committees will soon have a higher profile
than the audit committee. The reason is that executive compensation has become a hugely
sensitive issue. Shareholders now want to see a selection of chief executives of other
companies, active or retired, sitting on the compensation committee, combining an ability to
understand immensely complex compensation schemes with a sense of what it is both
reasonable and sensible to offer. Boards do not yet seem to be deliberately trying to recruit
the human-resources directors of other companies as outside directors, but that surely cannot
be far off.
State of independence
A third trend has been to bring in a larger proportion of outside directors. Typically, the board
of a big American company now has nine outside and two inside directors—the latter being
probably the chief executive and the CFO. More important is the enormous emphasis now put
on the independence of outside directors. Whereas they might once have been corporate
suppliers, bankers or customers, today big companies try vigorously to avoid recruiting
anybody who could conceivably have a conflict of interest.
The idea of directors' independence is not without controversy. Independence is a vague
concept and defining it has proved difficult. In a recent policy statement, TIAA/CREF, a big
activist-minded pension fund, says that independence means: no present or former
employment by the company or any significant financial or personal tie to the company or its
management that could compromise the director's objectivity and loyalty to the shareholders.
An independent director does not regularly perform services for the company, if a
disinterested observer would consider the relationship material. It does not matter if the
service is performed individually or as a representative of an organization that is a
professional adviser, consultant, or legal counsel to the company.
Some corporate-governance lobbyists want such people to make up the totality of non-
executives on company boards or, as in the case of TIAA/CREF, a “substantial majority”.
Others are content that they should merely account for more than half.
The question of independence is already a murky one in legal circles. Last year a Delaware
court controversially ruled that a shareholder lawsuit against Oracle, a software firm, could
proceed because a special committee formed to approve the sale of some shares by Oracle's
boss had not been sufficiently independent. That sent corporate lawyers into a flurry of
activity, warning clients to be more wary.
Finding independent directors is tough, but the increasing demands on their time are making
them ever harder to recruit. Companies are proving more reluctant to commit their
executives' time. Some big companies, for example, forbid their senior executives to take on
more than one directorship. One reason for caution is that a crisis or takeover bid at the other
company can embroil the outside directors in even more hours of time devoted to non-
executive responsibilities. Another is the risk of embarrassment: the board of
company A does not want to squirm just because its chief executive sits on the board of
company B which has hit trouble.
The effect has been to start changing the composition of boards. Search consultants now
approach humbler mortals: CFOs, general counsels and chief operating officers. The need to
find financial expertise to chair the audit committee has sparked a boom in demand for CFOs
and for retired partners of auditing firms. Three years ago, 10% of Korn/Ferry's searches
were for financial talent; now, 60% of them are.
A big worry is that ignorance may be the price of independence. Directors may know how to
read a company's financial statement, says Harvard's Mr Lorsch, but because they do not
know the business, they may hesitate to discuss the equally important issue of strategy. “They
don't talk enough about competitors, new products, the health of the business, what customers
think of us,” he grumbles. Last year he published a book with Colin Carter, a consultant with
the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), setting out his concerns.*
Certainly, in the few days a year that even the most energetic non-executive can devote, it is
hard to learn much about the workings of a large and complex organisation. And few
companies have well-structured induction programmes, mainly because new directors tend to
trickle in one at a time, making education costly.
Of course, some directors can learn too much and start to go native. This is a particular risk
for directors on the audit committee, says Ernst & Young's Ms Frieden. They need to
maintain their independence, but they also need to develop a deep understanding of the
company's financial statement, the business risk and the level of financial controls—but
without second-guessing management.
BCG's Mr Carter has a more subtle fear. If directors are known to be technically independent,
others may assume that they are also effectively independent. Yet the two do not necessarily
go together. On plenty of boards made up of old chums, a cosy culture can lull directors'
inquisitiveness. Sir Adrian Cadbury, the architect of Britain's system of corporate
governance, points to the board of Shell that took the wrong decision on disposing of a large
oil platform in the North Sea. “They all saw things the same way,” he says. “You only need
one person to ask the right question.”
Executive-free zones
By common consent, independence is an attitude of mind, rather than a list of business
credentials. A fourth innovation has, more than any other, helped boards to develop this
attitude. It is what Americans confusingly call “executive session”. This is a regular meeting,
required under the new listing rules of the New York Stock Exchange, of the board's non-
executive directors without the presence of the management or of the chief executive. As
chart 2 shows, it occurs mainly in America.
The rise of the executive session is, says Mr Lorsch, “absolutely the most important thing
that's happened”. Meeting without their powerful boss, directors are initially rather awkward,
he reports. Then they begin to talk: about the most recent board meeting, about a manager
whose presentation seemed inarticulate, sometimes even about the chief executive's strengths.
This can provide a golden opportunity to broach delicate subjects such as evaluating the chief
executive's performance or even the touchiest question of all: his succession. There is also a
change in the tone of discussions back in the boardroom. Directors grow bolder and more
willing to argue with the chief executive, knowing where others share their doubts.
But the effectiveness of executive sessions cannot disguise the unresolved questions in the
boardroom. How independent ought directors to be? And how to ensure that they are?
The OECD, a Paris-based international organisation, is drawing up corporate-governance
guidelines for its rich-country members. Among other effects, these will give shareholders
more control over the selection process. America's Securities and Exchange Commission is
aiming at the same goal with a proposal to make it easier for big shareholders to nominate
board members. OECD officials argue that American shareholders are less powerful than
those in Australia, Britain and Canada, who have, for example, the power to turf out an entire
board at their own initiative. Other members worry that enhanced shareholder power may be
abused: used, for instance, by a big investor to win a boardroom seat and promote his own
interests, rather than those of all shareholders equally.
And the emphasis on independence deepens the contrast between what happens on the boards
of publicly quoted companies and of the many businesses now owned and run by private
equity or venture capital. There, directors are hands-on and interventionist, rather than
independent and carefully distant. Public companies are increasingly governed by people
chosen because they know nothing about the business; privately owned companies are the
reverse.
One solution, suggested by Messrs Carter and Lorsch, might be to promote a third category
of director on the boards of public companies: the non-independent non-executive. A few
people who know the business well but don't work for it would improve strategic discussions,
and they could always leave the room when conflicts of interest arose. Moreover, provided
they were genuinely selected for their independence of mind and judgment, shareholders
might feel they were being better served than by the alternative: people who tick the right
boxes, but ask the wrong questions.
* “Back to the Drawing Board”, by Colin Carter and Jay Lorsch. Harvard Business School
Press, 2003.