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Corporate Governance: Six Essential Tasks for Boar...
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Supreme Court Decision on Citizens United Case is ...
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Early Care and Education
All children deserve the opportunity to start scho...
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Health Care
Employer-based health insurance is in decline....
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Frontpage Slideshow (version 2.0.0) - Copyright © 2006-2008 by JoomlaWorks
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Compensation Reform is Needed to Attract High-Quality Teachers |
By CED Trustee Steffen E. Palko, President and Vice Chairman (retired), XTO Energy, Inc., and Robert F. Pence, President and CEO, Freese and Nichols, Inc.
Strong teachers are key to improving the achievement of America's schoolchildren. Ensuring that every classroom is staffed with an effective teacher is a significant challenge, in no small part because the nation needs a lot of people to staff its schools. To attract enough high-quality individuals to the classroom, states and districts must rethink their compensation policies. Current pay and pension structures are out of sync with the realities of the 21st century labor market.
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“Good Debt” and “Bad Debt?” |
You’ve heard the story: A private business borrows money foolishly – say, to finance a corporate jet used mainly to fly the CEO off to ski. That borrowing surely results in “bad debt” – not necessarily debt that will not be repaid, but rather debt unwisely incurred, with little offsetting long-run benefit. On the other hand, the same firm might borrow to update its production equipment. That borrowing would increase debt, but it would be “good debt.”
The same could be true of a family. Borrow to finance an expensive vacation that you cannot afford in cash, and you accumulate “bad debt.” But borrow for education, or for a home where you build equity, and that is “good debt.”
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Making Sense of Clawbacks and Holdbacks |
By Ben W. Heineman Jr., former Senior Vice-President for Law and Public Affairs, General Electric, currently Senior Fellow, Harvard Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Author of High Performance with High Integrity (Harvard Business Press, June, 2008), and CED Trustee for Business Week
The "clawback" of pay from high-level executives for malfeasance is a hot but complex topic. Designed properly, such a practice can be an important mechanism for corporate accountability.
The Dodd-Frank bill, passed last month, mandated that any company listed on a U.S. securities exchange have substantive clawback requirements if it has material financial restatements. Also in July, the European Parliament passed legislation requiring clawbacks, and the U.K.'s Financial Services Authority revised a proposed rule on remuneration, effective next January, which has a new provision that will define clawbacks. Prior to these regulatory developments, 212 companies in the S&P 500 had adopted a variety of clawback policies, but hundreds of other public companies still don't have such compensation recovery policies as required by Dodd-Frank.
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The Building Blocks of Corporate Statesmanship |
Jørgen Vig Knudstorp is not a household name in America. And those few who may know him probably can't pronounce his name. Or remember how to spell it. But there are millions of American children and parents who know the company he runs and use his products every day. Mr. Vig Knudstorp is the CEO of the Danish-based children's company we know as LEGO.
As an educational "toy," the value of the LEGO building blocks has been phenomenal. What the company, now more than 80-years-old, calls the LEGO system of play -- "learning through LEGO" -- considers young children as role models for our future and as creative problem-solvers. Their CEO is quite sincere when he says that what the company really cares about is inspiring the young people who will build our tomorrow.
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