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21st Century Leadership in Action

During the past year, I have utilized this blog to address some of the pressing issues which business leaders of the 21st Century must be able to identify and resolve in order to ensure a reasonable level of corporate success. These monthly/bi-monthly entries focused on business leaders’ attitudes, behaviors, and values with the current day challenges of globalization, workplace diversity, and technological advancement. The following entry demonstrates 21st Century business leadership in action.
In March 2010, I was accepted as a member of Boardroom Bound – a 501(c)(3) National Public Service nonprofit, whose mission is to foster good governance, independence and diversity in the 21st Century boardroom. Boardroom Bound’s objective is to develop business leaders for future service in nonprofit, private business and publicly traded boardrooms. Boardroom Bound strives to fill the boardroom pipeline with highly qualified women and minority business leaders who are prepped to resolve business dilemmas such as balancing the quest for short term profits, long term sustainability, community social responsibility, and environmental citizenship.
Field research and personal experience have shown that the attitudes, beliefs, and values from leadership at the top of the organization will trickle down and become the attitudes, beliefs, and values of the employees within the organization. In this blog entry, I would like to share the following letter to Crain’s Chicago Business magazine from the Boardroom Bound Founder, Linda K. Bolliger about Diversity on Boards. More information on corporate leadership can be found in Corporate Leadership Selection: Impact on American Business, Employees, and Society (Authorhouse Publishing) now on sale through Amazon.com, Borders, and Barnes & Noble. For more details, please click on the icon of the book on the left side of this page.

Feedback to the weekly blog entry is always welcome.


OpEd: U.S. companies should make boardroom diversity a national economic imperative

LINDA BOLLIGER is chairman of Boardroom Bound in Northbrook.
By: Linda Bolliger January 18, 2010
The Securities and Exchange Commission should be congratulated for proposing measures addressing the poor business and governance practices instrumental in the 2008 Wall Street meltdown that nearly sacked the global economy and diminished America's standing in the eyes of the world.
In a July report, the commission solicited public comment on the need to address diversity policy and disclosure practices in boardrooms by publicly traded companies. It adopted it as a ruling in December. This new regulatory development is a natural evolution of diversity best business practices.
Since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case ended racial segregation in schools and public facilities, corporate America has invested billions of dollars in developing diverse human capital. Today, it is wrestling with the law of unintended consequences, as this same human capital knocks on its boardroom doors for admittance.
The corporate cries and pleas of difficulty in finding qualified, diverse candidates apparently fell on deaf ears. The recent ruling for publicly traded companies to report on boardroom diversity policy and disclosure is an additional arrow in the regulatory quiver to address the corporate board homogeny, cronyism and lockstep thinking that gave us the era of CEO-centric boards, from which America remains hung over.
These non-diverse boards produced today's excessive executive pay and risk-management issues. Finally, this era will fade as more diverse perspectives help American business compete effectively in a 21st-century global marketplace.
Now that the SEC has addressed this issue, it is counterintuitive for companies to ignore it. Companies that disparaged Sarbanes-Oxley legislation enacted in 2002 as too costly, time-consuming and intrusive sang the same tune in their public comments last year when the SEC proposed the diversity amendments adopted in December — despite the fact that members of diverse groups already represent the largest untapped resource for corporate board service. Protestations aside, when mining this talent pool became the law of the land, it became the corporate community's responsibility in both the workforce and the boardroom.
The real issue here is not "whether to" but rather how quickly corporate leaders can accept that diversity has become a requisite part of doing business. Ensuring recruitment of diverse director candidates and preparing next-generation business leaders to provide quality governance are key 21st-century business imperatives for protecting America's future standing in the global marketplace. Our national economic security depends upon companies fostering inclusive, quality governance.
Bravo to those companies that already diversified their boardrooms; and kudos to the SEC for proposing ways to nudge others to push diversity best practices in the corporate boardroom where they belong.

©2010 by Crain Communications Inc.