126 Items

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders speaking at a town meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, July 18, 2015

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Analysis & Opinions - Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation

Can Business Help Fix Our Broken Politics?

| October 23, 2016

Many business people are appalled at the current state of our politics. Few, however, would admit that the “business community” is responsible, in part, for our dysfunctional political culture. And fewer yet may be prepared to think about how business can take steps—in concert with other political actors—to help soothe the distemper.

How the CFO and General Counsel Can Partner More Effectively

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Analysis & Opinions - Harvard Business Review

How the CFO and General Counsel Can Partner More Effectively

| July 25, 2016

Commentators and researchers have focused on the crucial role of the CEO in leading effective corporate action to promotehigh performance, high integrity, and sound risk management. What receives far less attention is that, more and more in our increasingly complex, volatile, and fully-globalized business world, the effectiveness of such action depends on a powerful partnership between the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and the General Counsel (GC). This critical alliance needs and deserves much greater analysis and application.

The CFO-GC alliance has always been important because the finance function and the legal function are truly the nervous system of the corporation—sending critical signals to all parts of the company about the accuracy of the financials and compliance with law. But, the integration of finance and legal is even more consequential today because what the corporation can and cannot do across the globe is affected directly not just by financial and commercial issues which the CFO analyzes but, increasingly, by evolving “business and society” issues which the General Counsel and the corporate law department must address. These issues include legislation, regulation, litigation, enforcement, investigations, geopolitical risk, demands for ethical actions, and public criticism, affecting all the functions of the corporation in their interaction with all levels of global governments (central, regional, local). Especially in light of ever-increasing variety and intensity ofstakeholder demands on the corporation, these business and society issues, under the purview of the GC, must be closely fused with the CFO’s financial and commercial analysis to serve the CEO and top business leaders when they make and implement core strategic and operational decisions.

How Global Corporations Should Confront Pervasive Distrust

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Analysis & Opinions - Fortune

How Global Corporations Should Confront Pervasive Distrust

| July 12, 2016

Corporations have been attacked from both right and left during the 2016 presidential election: on trade, on immigration, on campaign finance, on crony capitalism, on inequality. Fortune Editor and long-time political reporter Alan Murray says business-government relations in the U.S. are “easily the worst in the three decades I’ve covered them.” But the current across-the-spectrum, anti-corporate distemper and distrust is a global trend as reflected in the Brexit vote which overrode consensus concerns about injury to both UK and non-UK business.

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Analysis & Opinions

Leading Questions: A Chat with Ben Heineman, Godfather of the In-House Bar

| June 17, 2016

In his 18 years as the top lawyer at General Electric, Ben Heineman helped transform the way people viewed in-house legal jobs, from a sleepy backwater into a prominent position with power equal to or surpassing law-firm partner roles.

Mr. Heineman, who retired in 2005, recently wrote a book codifying his thoughts on what’s changed in the relationship between law firm lawyers and their clients. “The Inside Counsel Revolution: Resolving the Partner-Guardian Tension” his fourth book, also delves into the responsibilities he believes general counsel have to not only think, “what’s legal?” but “what’s right?”

Corporations Need a Better Approach to Public Policy

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Analysis & Opinions - Harvard Business Review

Corporations Need a Better Approach to Public Policy

| April 1, 2016

All companies that operate internationally face a striking dual challenge in dealing with public policy: Nations across the globe enact an ever-changing, ever-expanding array of detailed legislation and regulation to protect workers, consumers, investors, and the public welfare, and these diverse rules shape what companies can and cannot do. Moreover, corporations are not trusted in this era of populist discontent because their role in shaping public policy is often seen as bought by money, shaped by elites, and concerned solely with private not public interests

Michael Millikin, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, General Motors Company, testifying before a US Senate subcommittee, July 17, 2014.

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Analysis & Opinions - Corporate Counsel

GM's GC and Some Theories of Culpability

| July 22, 2014

The role of General Motors Co. general counsel Michael Millikin in the deadly ignition-switch events should be a subject of intense interest and close scrutiny for lawyers working in, or for, complex corporations. But the recent—and I think overly simplistic— comments of prominent attorney John Quinn detract and do not add to a practical discussion about the responsibilities of general counsel.

General Motors Company CEO Mary Barra testifies during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on April 1, 2014 in Washington, DC.

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Analysis & Opinions - Corporate Counsel

GC and CEO Responsibility for GM's Dysfunctional Culture

| June 6, 2014

The report by Anton Valukas on the unconscionable multiyear delay by General Motors Co. in addressing safety issues caused by a malfunctioning ignition switch, focuses on the culpability of individuals in the past, including engineers, investigators and lawyers in the vast GM bureaucracy. What is missing, strikingly missing, is the failure of GM leaders—past CEOs and senior GM officers, including the current general counsel—to create a safety culture that would have immediately surfaced and addressed the particular switch issue and, more importantly, their failure to long ago and on their own initiative take the myriad safety culture, system and process steps which Valukas recommends today.

Jill Abramson at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, Aug. 26, 2012.

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Analysis & Opinions - Harvard Business Review

Does the New York Times Know How to Fire Someone?

| May 16, 2014

As media observers explore every angle of Jill Abramson’s unceremonious sacking from the New York Times, one key Management 101 question is whether she was given a fair chance to address the management issues that, according to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr, led him to dismiss her.