The first objective of the course will be to help prepare future corporate and non-profit Directors to fulfill their fiduciary duties of care and loyalty to the organizations that they will serve. Directors regularly deal with many issues. These include balancing efforts between establishing quarterly and yearly performance targets and building strong companies that can sustain above-market financial performance. Directors must also manage social and political relationships, diversity and inclusion programs, initiate and integrate acquisitions, create/change corporate culture, continually align the organization structure to the business strategy, allocate resources for a variety of corporate initiatives, deal with issues of corporate governance, succession planning, executive compensation, and learn to navigate through potential public relations disasters. We will examine as many of these topics as time permits.
The second objective of this course will be to understand the nature and scope of corporate Boards from the perspective of society, social and economic interest and what can be done to prevent some of the more publicized corporate governance failures. We will examine several of the more highly publicized corporate failures as well as what action Congress has taken to address corporate malfeasance, and the recommendations that have been made by social critics.
The course is directed primarily at graduate business students, law students, LBJ students, and select undergraduate honors students (Plan II and Business Honors) who expect to serve either as advisors to Boards of Directors or on Boards of Directors of businesses for profit and non-profit organizations. While the course will focus on established public companies, much of the course content will be useful to those individuals who are primarily interested in entrepreneurial organizations, family corporations, or public sector non-profit entities.