Nearly every author alive who has written a significant book on leadership gathered recently at Harvard’s Kennedy School to celebrate the career of the patriarch of their field, the redoubtable eighty-one year-old Warren Bennis.
Research and Insights Archive
Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations
Available Content
Grooming for the Top Post and Ending the CEO Succession Crisis
Yan Zhang (Rice University) and Nandini Rajagopalan (USC) compare three different types of options and related processes of CEO succession: relay succession, non-relay inside succession, and outside succession.
Who’s in the Boardroom and Does It Matter: The Impact of Having Non-Director Executives Attend Board Meetings
The present study by Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) and David Finegold (Keck Graduate Institute) looks at the impact of having key senior executives attend board meetings even though they are not on the board.
Corporate Governance and Job Creation: Changes in U.S. Boardrooms After Sarbanes Oxley
This chapter by David Finegold (Keck Graduate Institute) and Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) provides an overview of how the Boards of U.S. public corporations operate today and are changing in light of new legislation, regulations, and guidelines.
Why Business Schools Have Lost Their Way
Warren Bennis (USC) and Jim O’Toole (CEO) discuss how MBA programs face intense criticism for failing to impart useful skills, failing to prepare leaders, failing to instill norms of ethical behavior–and even failing to lead graduates to good corporate jobs.
How Corporate Boards are Changing
Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) and David Finegold (Keck Graduate Institute) state that over the past four years, corporate boards in the U.S. have been under increasing pressure. Stimulated by high-profile scandals, investor dissatisfaction with board performance and questions about the level of executive compensation, regulators have introduced significant reforms in the rules governing boards.
Are Independent Directors the Answer?
A recent survey Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) and David Finegold (Keck Graduate Institute) conducted with Mercer Delta of directors in Fortune 1000 companies found that board members themselves feel that of all the proposed board reforms, having boards and audit committees made up of independent directors are by far the most likely to have a positive impact on boards.
The Competency Conundrum: The Challenge For Leadership Development
Jay A. Conger (CEO) and Douglas Ready ask “What do the Bank of America, General Electric, IBM, Luthansa, Pepsico, Pfizer, Royal Dutch Shell, and RBC Financial Group share in common when it comes to leadership development?”
Growing Your Company’s Leaders: How Great Organizations Use Succession Management to Sustain Competitive Advantage
Robert M. Fulmer and Jay A. Conger, (AMACOM, 2004) ask “Why do so many newly minted leaders fail so spectacularly?” Part of the problem is that in many companies, succession planning is little more than creating a list of high-potential employees and the slots they might fill.
Build A Better Leadership Pipeline
Jay A. Conger (CEO) and Robert M. Fulmer ask the question “What could be more vital to a company’s long-term health than the choice and cultivation of its future leaders?”
Why Leadership Development Efforts Fail
J. Conger and D. Ready state that in the past couple of years, leadership has become the hottest topic in business. Companies see this hard-to-pin-down ability as essential to organizational success, and they want their executives to learn how to exercise it.
Competence, Not Competencies: Making Global Executive Development Work
George P. Hollenbeck and Morgan W. McCall, Jr. share that as we begin the 21st century, evidence abounds that executive and leadership development has failed to meet expectations.