A quiet revolution came to corporate America during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Large shareholders - pension funds, insurance companies, money managers, and commercial banks - exercised new-found muscle, pressuring senior managers to improve disappointing financial results by reshaping their organizations. Michael Useem reveals how those investor pressures have transformed the inside structures of many corporations, better aligning them with shareholder interests. Useem draws on numerous sources, including interviews with senior managers and intensive studies of seven large corporations representing a range of restructuring experiences and industries - including pharmaceuticals, transportation, chemicals, retailing, and financial services. He shows that organizational changes have affected many areas of corporate life: headquarters staffs have been reduced, authority has filtered down to operating units, and compensation has become more closely tied to performance. Change also extends to corporate governance, where managers have fought back by seeking legal safeguards against takeovers and by staggering board terms. They've also put significant resources into building more effective relations with shareholders. As Useem demonstrates, this revolution has reached beyond the corporation, influencing American politics and law. As increasing ownership concentration has caused companies to focus more attention on shareholders, corporate political agendas have shifted from fighting government regulation to resisting shareholder intrusion. This book will be important reading for managers, economists, lawyers, financial analysts, and all observers of American business.

Boards of directors are sitting ducks. Shareholders complain and even attack, management manipulates, and individual board members have little power, able to act only as part of the board as a whole. Governance issues are front and center, yet there is often little understanding, even among board members, of the key role that they play. Written in an accessible and human voice, The Governance Revolution: What Every Board Member Needs to Know, NOW! provides information and context essential to anyone seeking to understand how corporations and their stewards—the board of directors—can and should function in the volatile world we inhabit. Deborah Hicks Midanek offers useful insight into what board members of corporations actually do, the current standards for board members and why they exist. She includes a timely discussion of how clarity of purpose can improve board and director effectiveness. Informed by her long experience serving public, private, and family owned corporate boards as well as those of charitable, and government organizations, she provides essential context regarding the evolution of board practice as well as candid discussion of the issues involved in the relentless effort to improve corporate governance processes. Focused mainly on the dominant public corporation, she also explores the special challenges of serving private and family owned as well as nonprofit and public agency boards. Written by a seasoned board member, and liberally laced with stories and cases illustrating the tricky issues directors wrestle with, this book is the essential common-sense companion for anyone working with a board, serving on a board, or wanting to do so. Directors, aspiring directors, investors, and students of corporate behavior will benefit from this highly readable description of the cloistered boardroom. For Roger Trapp's article in Forbes featuring a discussion of this title click here https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogertrapp/2018/10/22/independent-directors-nehttps://www.forbes.com/sites/rogertrapp/2018/10/22/independent-directors-need-to-stand-up-to-activists/#7060008826b0ed-to-stand-up-to-activists/#7060008826b0 For a Roundtable discussion in Financier Worldwide Magazine featuring Deborah Hicks Midanek please click here https://www.financierworldwide.com/roundtable-risks-facing-directors-officers-aug18#.W1BqQdVKiUk Click here for a review in Financial Analysts Journal https://www.cfapubs.org/doi/abs/10.2469/br.v13.n1.10 Click here for an excerpt on Corporate Board Member: https://boardmember.com/what-is-the-governance-revolution/

This book analyzes the historical quest of the Islamic Republic of Iran to export its revolution to the Muslim countries in the Middle East and beyond. The authors argue that Iran exported its revolution by using proxies such as Hezbollah, the Iraqi Shite militias, and the Houthis. The study unravels the casual chain behind less-known cases of Iranian sponsorship of al Qaeda (Central) and al Qaida in Iraq. It combines rigorous theory with detailed empirical analysis which can add to the current debate about ways to roll back Iran’s revolutionary export.

How consumer desire for sustainability is powering the first demand-driven, transformative megatrend—and how business leaders can make the most of this important moment. Sustainability is rocking the business world as profoundly as any global trend of the past, from electrification to digitalization. But unlike previous revolutions, this one is being driven by consumers, for whom environmentally sound practices matter as much as price, quality, and brand. In The Demand Revolution, Andreas von der Gathen, Nicolai Broby Eckert, and Caroline Kastbjerg offer a strategic framework for winning these consumers—and taking advantage of the vast commercial opportunity presented by sustainability as the first demand-driven, transformative megatrend. The first movers in the Demand Revolution will be able to create enduring competitive advantages and high entry barriers built around redesigned business model ecosystems and customer loyalty, the authors explain, but this will require a critical adjustment in thinking and approach. Companies, first of all, have to catch up with consumers, who see themselves on a demand curve far beyond what companies currently perceive. Business leaders must shift their focus from the cost of sustainability to its potential for generating growth and long-term profits. This, in turn, means recognizing that the classic adoption curves for innovations—and the strategic playbooks derived from those insights—no longer apply. The Demand Revolution shows business leaders how to look beyond easy fixes and incremental outcomes and instead pursue high-risk, high-reward moves geared toward the source of exponential growth: the world’s consumers.