Hi members!
We’re taking a look at corporate boards this week, examining the role they’ve played (or abdicated) at companies like CBS, Theranos, Facebook, and other places where stronger oversight might have caught problems that instead became full-blown scandals and controversies.
We begin with a state of play memo that asks the question: Has the board’s job gotten too big? Today’s companies need to be as agile as cats to navigate a fast-moving, hyper-sensitive operating environment filled with disruptive technologies, cyber threats, and social media. Yet we still govern them with a core structure that, literally, was designed in the Middle Ages. There are new ways to think about a board, from increased professionalization to using machine learning to help clarify choices. No matter what the remedies are, this idea that a group of people who only meet a few times a year and are chosen not in spite of their ignorance of a company’s workings, but because of it, is ripe for change.
Over the coming days, we’ll be looking at other dimensions of the board and ask another question: Is this a job anyone should want anymore? What used to be a relatively sleepy way to make some money and pick up some prestige is now a minefield full of litigation and malfeasance.
Also today, Allison Schrager looks at legal status of sex workers around the globe and makes the argument that, in order to protect sex workers and more effectively stamp out instances of abuse, prostitution should be made legal. Other taboos have become mainstream (cannabis, gambling), but sex work is one of the few areas left in society that remains undiscussed, to the detriment of the people who work in it.
We’ll have lots more this week, like our Insider View, Consummate Consumer, and Private Key features, so stay tuned.
We want to hear from you! Please send comments, questions, and nominees to the compensation committee to members@qz.com.
Here’s to a rewarding day,
Sam Grobart
membership editor