Farient Briefings: A Look Back at Comp Committees’ Greatest Challenges

What a year it has been. Our world was beset by unthinkable humanitarian crises and wars likely to alter social, personal, and political proclivities for generations to come. It was a good year to refresh our thinking on all aspects of leadership beginning perhaps with Walter Bennis and Burt Nanus’s 1991 book. Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge introduced the concept of VUCA, an acronym for volatility, complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity originally coined at the U.S. Army War College in 1987. (Ever since some military brass have challenged its misappropriation by civilians, but that’s a story for another time.) Nonetheless, VUCA does capture the importance of agility when so much of what constitutes day-to-day decision-making is beyond our control to manage. The boardroom is deluged with such a wide range of risks, it’s wise to manage that which can be controlled. For business to march on,  priorities at all levels of an organization must be in order. As executive pay and corporate governance advisors, what boards and their comp committees pay leadership is our exclusive focus.

In this—our last newsletter issue of 2023—we revisit some of this year’s top stories in governance as we saw them complete with charts from our Data Analytics Team—DAT for short.