On September 18, 2018, The Conference Board and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP co-hosted a panel discussion on the key findings from the Conference Board’s Job of the Corporate Director Series. Participants in the panel discussion included Victor Lewkow and Jared Gerber, partners at Cleary Gottlieb, and John Wilcox, Chairman of Morrow Sodali.

Moderator Doug Chia, executive director of The Conference Board, and the panelists discussed a number of topics related to the job of the corporate director, including:

• the job description of the corporate director and lessons that directors can learn from company failures and crises;
• the boards’ risk oversight and recommended practices for directors;
• the board’s role in CEO succession planning;
• board composition, including how boards can ensure they have the right mix of perspectives through board diversity, board refreshment, board evaluations and use of directors with particular areas of expertise;
• expectations and best practices in director-shareholder engagement, in particular the role of directors in engagement with activist investors; and
• the board’s interaction with management, including the asymmetric information risk in relying on information prepared by management and legal concerns raised by activist-directors using their own staff to prepare analyses of the company.

A replay of the webcast is available here (please note that your browser may require you to run an Adobe plugin to access this content).