All Briefs

This Q&A with Jeff Cunningham discusses the job of the corporate director from his perspective as a business media and corporate governance executive. He touches upon topics such as transparency of information discussed in board meetings and the importance of diversity in the boardroom.

Are your social impact measurement efforts providing useful results? If not, it might be time to up your game. Moody's reinvented its CSR approach to mirror the company’s global footprint, be authentic to its culture, and align with its businesses. In doing so, the company engaged the Impact Genome Project to assess the Moody’s Foundation’s grant portfolio for alignment with its focus areas.

With government regulation lagging, technological outcomes depend on how businesses develop and apply them. It’s important that companies fill that gap by complementing their digital transformation journey with a governance arrangement that drives ethics and builds trust.

Is your brand at risk? Branding carries economic risks that are, on the one hand, similar to other corporate risks—theft, fire, weather-related damage, etc.—but different in that they attack the value of intangible assets, like brands. If you are not yet affected by Brand Equity Risk (BER), it’s almost certain you will be, so you need to manage it like any other risk your organization faces.

The author recommends the board chair lead a discussion about understanding and protecting the board’s reputation. The discussion is about both the board’s internal and its external reputation—how to build it; how to leverage it; how to protect it.

The stakes for getting D&I right are high, both for organizations and individuals. Unfortunately, many of our familiar D&I ‘best practices’ are inadequate amid ever-evolving demands and complicated contexts. To advance D&I outcomes, we need next practices.

Are nonprofits—a crucial economic sector—getting the support they need to flourish? According to Independent Sector, there are over 1.6 million tax exempt nonprofit organizations in the United States—the third largest workforce in the country behind retail and manufacturing. Yet, the nonprofit sector is critically understaffed, under-capitalized, and overwhelmed. It needs support to fulfill its vital mission.

How does an active wear brand become an activist icon? Deliberately or despite itself? Can product, purpose, profit, and politics mesh—or do they risk unraveling? And what’s the story behind the unconventional Patagonia beer? These questions and more will be answered in The Conference Board Marketing and Communications Center's April Monthly Chat.

How do you respond when someone publishes a story about you that isn’t true? Here’s how Mayo Clinic handled such a situation in August 2018 when CNN ran this: “Escape from the Mayo Clinic: Teen accuses world-famous hospital of ‘medical kidnapping.’”

What is needed is a radically new governance model aligned with the high-performance requirements of the current hyper-competitive business environment.