Some of the worst corporate meltdowns over the past sixty years can be traced to passive directors who favored operational shortcuts over quality growth strategies. Thinking primarily about placating institutional investors, selective stockholders, proxy advisors, and corporate management, these inattentive and deferential board members have relied on short-term share price increases to sustain their companies long term. Driven by a desire for prosperity, not posterity, these actions can doom any company. In The Activist Director, attorney Ira M. Millstein looks back at fifty years of counseling companies, nonprofits, and governments to actively govern their corporations and constituencies. From the threat of bankruptcy and the ConEd blackout of 1970s New York City, to the meltdown of Drexel Burnham Lambert in the late 1980s, to the turnaround of General Motors in the mid-1990s, Millstein takes readers into the boardrooms of several of the greatest catastrophes and success stories of America's best-known corporations. His solution lies at the top: a new breed of activist directors who partner with management and reject short-term outlooks, plan a future based on growth and innovation, and take responsibility for corporate organization, strategy, and efficiency. What questions should we ask of potential board members and how do we know they'll be active? Millstein offers pragmatic suggestions for recruiting activist directors to the boardroom to secure the future of the corporation.

Named one of the 2003 books of the year in the "Economist" "A convincing explanation of why, despite all of the recent reforms in American corporate governance, there will probably be more firms that go the way of Enron."
In the last thirty years, there has been a gradual erosion in the abilities and responsibilities of corporate boards. In addition to the ethics scandals that have plagued companies both new and established over the last three years, a number of over-diversified, over-staffed companies experienced failures that might have been avoided had there been proper oversight on the part of the board. While reform of the governance system has received considerable attention from the press, business leaders, and politicians, there have been few analyses of what is really happening on a systemic level, and even fewer workable suggestions for reform.
"The Recurrent Crisis in Corporate Governance" provides an expert assessment of what went wrong on corporate boards and how to fix them. The book begins with both a legal and economic examination of corporate governance during the last three decades, including the broad issue of boards taking on responsibilities without being able to fulfill their obligations because of the lack of access to information and people within the corporation. The authors then go on to show the correlation between strong board performance and strong company performance, make the case for separating the CEO and Chair positions, comment on the collapse of nine major corporations, including Global Crossing, K-Mart, Lucent, and Qwest, and provide suggestions on how boards can be more effective stewards of the shareholders' and public's trust.

Some of the worst corporate meltdowns over the past sixty years can be traced to passive directors who favored operational shortcuts over quality growth strategies. Thinking primarily about placating institutional investors, selective stockholders, proxy advisors, and corporate management, these inattentive and deferential board members have relied on short-term share price increases to sustain their companies long term. Driven by a desire for prosperity, not posterity, these actions can doom any company. In The Activist Director, attorney Ira M. Millstein looks back at fifty years of counseling companies, nonprofits, and governments to actively govern their corporations and constituencies. From the threat of bankruptcy and the ConEd blackout of 1970s New York City, to the meltdown of Drexel Burnham Lambert in the late 1980s, to the turnaround of General Motors in the mid-1990s, Millstein takes readers into the boardrooms of several of the greatest catastrophes and success stories of America's best-known corporations. His solution lies at the top: a new breed of activist directors who partner with management and reject short-term outlooks, plan a future based on growth and innovation, and take responsibility for corporate organization, strategy, and efficiency. What questions should we ask of potential board members and how do we know they'll be active? Millstein offers pragmatic suggestions for recruiting activist directors to the boardroom to secure the future of the corporation.

Both the Prophet Joseph Smith and his "Book of Mormon" have been characterized as ardently, indeed evangelically, antimasonic. Yet in this sweeping social, cultural, and religious history of nineteenth-century Mormonism and its milieu, Forsberg argues that masonry, like evangelical Christianity, was an essential component of Smith's vision.