Speaking Out on Governance


Book Description

Winner of the GOLD Nonfiction Book Award presented by the Nonfiction Authors Association! Speaking Out on Governance presents a range of viewpoints concerning the role of today’s corporation and its board of directors. The author engages in candid discussion with subject matter experts including boardmembers, corporate attorneys, academics, institutional investors, regulators, and activists. These interviews of leading authorities in the corporate governance arena provide the reader with unique insight into the vitally important but often misunderstood role played by the board. Deborah Hicks Midanek discusses perspectives regarding what directors of businesses actually do and should do; the true motivations and concerns of the various parties seeking to influence corporate behavior; legal issues surrounding the board; and the key similarities and differences of opinion that may help improve effectiveness of all parties and increase board and director effectiveness. This book is essential reading for corporate directors and would-be directors, senior managers, attorneys, consultants and anyone interested in what drives organizational behavior.




Speaking Out on Governance


Book Description

Winner of the GOLD Nonfiction Book Award presented by the Nonfiction Authors Association! Speaking Out on Governance presents a range of viewpoints concerning the role of today’s corporation and its board of directors. The author engages in candid discussion with subject matter experts including boardmembers, corporate attorneys, academics, institutional investors, regulators, and activists. These interviews of leading authorities in the corporate governance arena provide the reader with unique insight into the vitally important but often misunderstood role played by the board. Deborah Hicks Midanek discusses perspectives regarding what directors of businesses actually do and should do; the true motivations and concerns of the various parties seeking to influence corporate behavior; legal issues surrounding the board; and the key similarities and differences of opinion that may help improve effectiveness of all parties and increase board and director effectiveness. This book is essential reading for corporate directors and would-be directors, senior managers, attorneys, consultants and anyone interested in what drives organizational behavior.




The Governance Revolution


Book Description

Boards of directors are sitting ducks. Shareholders complain and even attack, management manipulates, and individual board members have little power, able to act only as part of the board as a whole. Governance issues are front and center, yet there is often little understanding, even among board members, of the key role that they play. Written in an accessible and human voice, The Governance Revolution: What Every Board Member Needs to Know, NOW! provides information and context essential to anyone seeking to understand how corporations and their stewards—the board of directors—can and should function in the volatile world we inhabit. Deborah Hicks Midanek offers useful insight into what board members of corporations actually do, the current standards for board members and why they exist. She includes a timely discussion of how clarity of purpose can improve board and director effectiveness. Informed by her long experience serving public, private, and family owned corporate boards as well as those of charitable, and government organizations, she provides essential context regarding the evolution of board practice as well as candid discussion of the issues involved in the relentless effort to improve corporate governance processes. Focused mainly on the dominant public corporation, she also explores the special challenges of serving private and family owned as well as nonprofit and public agency boards. Written by a seasoned board member, and liberally laced with stories and cases illustrating the tricky issues directors wrestle with, this book is the essential common-sense companion for anyone working with a board, serving on a board, or wanting to do so. Directors, aspiring directors, investors, and students of corporate behavior will benefit from this highly readable description of the cloistered boardroom. For Roger Trapp's article in Forbes featuring a discussion of this title click here https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogertrapp/2018/10/22/independent-directors-nehttps://www.forbes.com/sites/rogertrapp/2018/10/22/independent-directors-need-to-stand-up-to-activists/#7060008826b0ed-to-stand-up-to-activists/#7060008826b0 For a Roundtable discussion in Financier Worldwide Magazine featuring Deborah Hicks Midanek please click here https://www.financierworldwide.com/roundtable-risks-facing-directors-officers-aug18#.W1BqQdVKiUk Click here for a review in Financial Analysts Journal https://www.cfapubs.org/doi/abs/10.2469/br.v13.n1.10 Click here for an excerpt on Corporate Board Member: https://boardmember.com/what-is-the-governance-revolution/




Corporate Governance Matters


Book Description

Corporate Governance Matters gives corporate board members, officers, directors, and other stakeholders the full spectrum of knowledge they need to implement and sustain superior governance. Authored by two leading experts, this comprehensive reference thoroughly addresses every component of governance. The authors carefully synthesize current academic and professional research, summarizing what is known, what is unknown, and where the evidence remains inconclusive. Along the way, they illuminate many key topics overlooked in previous books on the subject. Coverage includes: International corporate governance. Compensation, equity ownership, incentives, and the labor market for CEOs. Optimal board structure, tradeoffs, and consequences. Governance, organizational strategy, business models, and risk management. Succession planning. Financial reporting and external audit. The market for corporate control. Roles of institutional and activist shareholders. Governance ratings. The authors offer models and frameworks demonstrating how the components of governance fit together, with concrete examples illustrating key points. Throughout, their balanced approach is focused strictly on two goals: to “get the story straight,” and to provide useful tools for making better, more informed decisions.




Private Government


Book Description

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can’t see it One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers’ speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.




Speaking Out in Vietnam


Book Description

Since 1990 public political criticism has evolved into a prominent feature of Vietnam's political landscape. So argues Benedict Kerkvliet in his analysis of Communist Party–ruled Vietnam. Speaking Out in Vietnam assesses the rise and diversity of these public displays of disagreement, showing that it has morphed from family whispers to large-scale use of electronic media. In discussing how such criticism has become widespread over the last three decades, Kerkvliet focuses on four clusters of critics: factory workers demanding better wages and living standards; villagers demonstrating and petitioning against corruption and land confiscations; citizens opposing China's encroachment into Vietnam and criticizing China-Vietnam relations; and dissidents objecting to the party-state regime and pressing for democratization. He finds that public political criticism ranges from lambasting corrupt authorities to condemning repression of bloggers to protesting about working conditions. Speaking Out in Vietnam shows that although we may think that the party-state represses public criticism, in fact Vietnamese authorities often tolerate and respond positively to such public and open protests.




The Government's Speech and the Constitution


Book Description

Identifies and explains the constitutional problems triggered by the government's speech, and proposes a new framework for thinking about them.




63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read


Book Description

A collection of government documents dating back to 1950's.




Shut Up, I'm Talking


Book Description

Shut Up, I'm Talking is a smart, hilarious insider take on Israeli politics that reads like the bastard child of Thomas Friedman and David Sedaris. Now a political writer for Salon, Gregory Levey stumbled into a job as speechwriter for the Israeli delegation to the United Nations at age twenty-five and suddenly found himself, like a latter-day Zelig, in the company of foreign ministers, U.S. senators, and heads of state. Much to his surprise, he was soon attending U.N. sessions and drafting official government statements. The situation got stranger still when he was transferred to Jerusalem to write speeches for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Shut Up, I'm Talking is a startling account of Levey's journey into the nerve center of Middle Eastern politics at one of the most turbulent times in Israeli history. During his three years in the Israeli government, the Second Intifada continued on in fits and starts, Yasser Arafat died, Hamas came to power, and Ariel Sharon fell into a coma. Levey was repeatedly thrust into highly improbable situations -- from being the sole "Israeli" delegate (even though he's Canadian) at the U.N. General Assembly, with no idea how "his" country wanted to vote; to nearly inciting an international incident with his high school French translation of an Arab diplomat's anti-Israel remarks; to communicating with Israeli intelligence about the suspected perpetrators of suicide bombings; to being offered leftover salami from Ariel Sharon's lunch. As Levey got better acquainted with the personalities in the government's inner sanctum, he witnessed firsthand the improvisational and ridiculously casual nature of the country's behind-the-scenes leadership -- and realized that he wasn't the only one faking his way through politics. With sharp insight and great appreciation for the absurd, Levey offers the first-ever look inside Israel's politics from the perspective of a complete outsider, ultimately concluding that the Israeli government is no place for a nice Jewish boy.




Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government


Book Description

Reprint of sole edition. Originally published: New York: Harper Brothers Publishers, [1948]. "Dr. Meiklejohn, in a book which greatly needed writing, has thought through anew the foundations and structure of our theory of free speech . . . he rejects all compromise. He reexamines the fundamental principles of Justice Holmes' theory of free speech and finds it wanting because, as he views it, under the Holmes doctrine speech is not free enough. In these few pages, Holmes meets an adversary worthy of him . . . Meiklejohn in his own way writes a prose as piercing as Holmes, and as a foremost American philosopher, the reach of his culture is as great . . . this is the most dangerous assault which the Holmes position has ever borne." --JOHN P. FRANK, Texas Law Review 27:405-412. ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN [1872-1964] was dean of Brown University from 1901-1913, when he became president of Amherst College. In 1923 Meiklejohn moved to the University of Wisconsin- Madison, where he set up an experimental college. He was a longtime member of the National Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1945 he was a United States delegate to the charter meeting of UNESCO in London. Lectureships have been named for him at Brown University and at the University of Wisconsin. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963.