Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor that has long been associated with Yahoo, has decided to step down from his position at Yahoo’s board, stating that the Internet search giant no longer has any need for an activist investor. Icahn’s legacy with Yahoo involves his ardent efforts to get Jerry Yang removed as the CEO of the company.
According to Icahn, Yang acted in such a way that was against the best interests of shareholders, opting to replace Yang with Carol Bartz. Following the replacement, Icahn and the rest of the board guided Yahoo toward a search and advertising deal with Microsoft.
Icahn …read more

Fewer African-Americans are on boards of directors of Fortune 500 companies according to a new study that was commissioned by The Executive Leadership Council. The study finds that board seats held has declined since 2004.
In 2004, the percentage was 8.1%. in 2008, this study found that the number had dipped to 7.4%.
Dr. Ancella B. Livers, The Executive Leadership Council’s Institute for Leadership Development & Research’s executive director, believes that the current economic downturn should allow for companies to take another look at their board of directors.
Said Livers: “African Americans lost ground in the boardrooms of corporate America between 2004 and …read more

In a recent filing with the SEC, Bank of America revealed that two more directors have left the company. Within the last few months, Bank of America has seen a whole lot of changes on its board of directors.
The latest departures are Tommy Franks and Joseph Prueher. Both of these Bank of America directors left the company on Wednesday.
Based in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bank of America shareholders have been extremely mad as of late. Not only has the company’s stock plummeted, Bank of America has also made a number of questionable decisions — including the purchase of Merrill Lynch.
The moves …read more

Bank of America continues to see a lot of comings and goings on their board of directors. On Monday, two more directors left the board. The news was released during the day by Bank of America.
The two latest directors who left were Patricia Mitchell and Jackie Ward. Mitchel is the chief executive officer at The Paley Center for Media, while Ward worked at Computer General.
All the moving on the Bank of America board of directors begin when Kenneth Lewis was ousted as the chairman by shareholders. Then two others decided to leave — O. Temple Sloan Jr. and Robert Tillman.
To …read more

There will be four new faces at Bank of America’s board meetings: Federal Reserve Governor Susan Bies, former Compass Bancshares Inc. leader D. Paul Jones, former FDIC Chairman Donald Power, and retired  Bank One Corp. and Visa International Inc. executive William Boardman. These outside directors will bring their collective experience to the troubled financial giant.
The new additions follow the departure of Robert Tillmann, former Lowe’s Cos. Inc. chief executive, who resigned from the Bank of America board on May 29. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tillman’s resignation had nothing to do with any conflicts with Bank of America or …read more

A great article in Strategy+Business, “A Blueprint for Strategic Leadership”, concentrates on how to lead innovation. In it the authors emphasize that the best leaders pay a great deal of attention to the design of the elements around them. Seemingly basic, but powerful, things to do are:
1. Articulate purpose,
2. Create effective teams,
3. Prioritize and sequence initiatives, and
4. Redesign the organization to make execution easier.
Apart from revealing the importance of doing the right projects, the article is full of fascinating examples of the deployment of these principles by the best executives; two from the experiences of A.G. Lafley, chief executive of …read more

A Booz Allen Hamilton survey and report in Strategy+Business (register for free) found NO correlation existed between R&D spend and innovation. It turns out that higher innovation performers spent less but made sure that innovation projects aligned with corporate strategy and paid careful attention to customers. This idea that a company can spend less and innovate more makes sense. Throwing money at innovation processes that are not well organized and/or measured and not serving the customer doesn’t work.
Black and Decker revealed the two key factors related to their innovation success:
1. Strategy alignment- align innovation strategies to corporate strategy.
2. Customer focus- …read more

Sometimes you get unexpected insights. My post “What’s Harder? Project Management or Management” elicited a wonderfully simple “boxes” analogy from Ren Garcia at Accounting Solver. In it he said:
“In a standard hierarchical corporate organization, you have specializations through boxes (i.e., departments, divisions, sections, etc) identifying finance, marketing, production, human resources, etc. Frequently, the specializations become rigid over time and the boxes neglect to communicate with each other (The managers or heads of boxes are supposed to be doing this, but often neglect).
Consequently, integration of all the functions / tasks / responsibilities within the corporation becomes a difficult process. The entire …read more

 
Fascinating conversation with an executive of an agile software development firm about transformation projects as they compare to lean manufacturing initiatives. Lean transformations have settled into starting with training heavily laced with practical activities. The reason that this is so important is that the approach is NOT intuitive.
Lean requires a person to experience how the concepts can change and increase the value of a process, whether it be software development or manufacturing products. One of the most valuable exercises is the traditional lean manufacturing simulation consisting of 4-5 iterations of improvement to clearly reveal how each lean concept influences results. Many times …read more

A recent September 2007 Gartner study titled “Building Agile Manufacturing That Enables Transformation” made several great points:
1. Changing forces in market, customer expectations and technology demand more agility and quickness in business processes.
2.  Using a ”myths” leading to “misses” discussion they challenge people to look outside their environment for innovations saying that people and companies tend to “lock in” to solutions because of tradition and inability to search outside their four walls.
3. ”Chaos-tolerant” business processes are what is needed in the future. Using a technique called capable-to-promise as an example of chaos-tolerant business processes, they say that future technology will enable them.
Capable-to-promise is basically the ability to quickly …read more