The activist director : lessons from the boardroom and the future of the corporation / Ira M. Millstein.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

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Library Journal Review

Millstein (coauthor, The Recurrent Crisis in Corporate Governance) is founding chair of Columbia University Law School's Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership, as well as senior partner of the international law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. His qualifications and experience are exhaustive. Millstein has worked with several gubernatorial and presidential administrations as well as being a consultant to corporations and governments on governance. He here emphasizes what he's learned throughout his career, including the need for corporate boards of directors to take a proactive role in the running of corporations and governmental agencies and to challenge managements and administrations in their operations. Millstein's vast history gives weight to his comments and his relating of concrete events with the likes of General Motors and ConEd as well as the city and state of New York lends authority to his recommendations. Verdict This book needs to be available to students, academics, and practitioners of corporate and municipal governance.-Littleton Maxwell, formerly with Robins Sch. of Business, Univ. of Richmond © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.