Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS) has now formalized its position on director compensation bylaws.
Month: January 2014
April 4th English “Director Boot Camp” – Now Taking Applications!
This one-dayintensive program teaches participants the key legal and corporate governance knowledge they need to responsibly serve on, report to, or analyze boards of Japanese companies, both public and private. The course consists of short lectures interspersed with ample time for interactive discussion and questions-and-answers about real-life situations that occur on boards, and how to handle them. The course is usually good fun for everybody, since we all learn from each others' experiences, as well as from BDTI. The program will cover topics such as:
Canon Appoints First Outside Directors After Years of Resistance
(Reuters) – Canon Inc has appointed its first outside directors, ending years of high-profile resistance to opening up its boardroom as pressure mounts on Japan's big companies to improve governance and better manage risks.
The camera maker's long-serving chief executive Fujio Mitarai, who headed Japan's powerful Keidanren business lobby from 2006 to 2010, had argued that only insiders could understand the company well enough to serve effectively on its board.
Review of Robert Monks’ “Citizens Disunited” by James McRitchie
Review Essay: Citizens DisUnitedJames McRitchie,April 24, 2013, Citizens DisUnited: Passive Investors, Drone CEOs, and the Corporate Capture of the American Dreamboth delights and informs as only Robert A.G. Monks can. No one else writes so wellabout topics like “How CEOs and the Business Roundtable Hijacked the World’s Greatest Wealth Machine” and those in the current […]
“For the Love of Money” – NY Times
A fine article that captures the essence of the money society and money addiction – ”IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted….
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/for-the-love-of-money.html?_r=0
US judge Orders Sanctions Against Big Four Auditors in China (Shearman & Sterling)
The Administrative Law Judge in the SEC’s long-running case against the Chinese affiliates of the Big Four auditors has issued an order barring the firms from practicing before the SEC for six months. The opinion can be viewed at
http://www.sec.gov/alj/aljdec/2014/id553ce.pdf.
Cisco Annual Security Report Documents Unprecedented Growth of Advanced Attacks and Malicious Traffic
Threats Take Advantage of Expanding Attack Surface with New Technique
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks 2014 report
The World Economic Forum released its Global Risks 2014 on January 16.
You can download the report from the following URL:
http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2014/
April 17th, “Reading Japanese Financial Statements as a Board Member” (Course)
This course is now fully booked.
Course Description: This is an intensive full-afternoon session intended tobrush-up (or as they say in Japanese, level-up) participants' familiarity with: a) someof the more complex but important topics that arisein interpreting financial statementsin Japan;b) key emerging issues such as IFRS; and c) how strategy and cash flows are reflected in financial statements.
“Does Society Need Altruists? Coevolution of General Trust and Social Intelligence”
Paper by Hiroshi Shibuya,Professor of Economics at Otaru University of Commerce. The altruists ofus had great interest in this paper, which answers the question, are we useful to society?