From Volume 85, Number 2 (January 2012)
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History has shown that the scholarly and regulatory focus on board composition and structure is a dangerously incomplete solution to the problems that have caused recent corporate failures. The media and corporate scholars have assigned much of the blame for the 2008 financial crisis and the Enron-era corporate scandals to corporate boards. The conventional diagnosis of these ills is that boards were largely at fault because they failed to effectively monitor corporate officers. Unfortunately the conventional diagnosis of the problem is incomplete and the policy prescriptions flowing from this faulty diagnosis are unlikely to address the very real problems that continue to plague corporate governance.
The principal problem is that most regulatory attempts fail to adequately consider an essential step in understanding the board’s relationship to corporate failure: the process by which boards monitor corporate performance. By relying on insights from a robust organization behavior literature, this Article demonstrates that the processes boards employ to undertake their monitoring function are in need of significant improvement. In other words, how boards engage in management monitoring should be the focus of corporate regulatory reform, more so than who sits on boards or how boards are structured.
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