Ringing the European Bell of NYSE Euronext

Publisher Jay Whitehead, Editorial Director Dirk Olin, and Managing Director Faye Holland open the European markets of the NYSE Euronext.

CR’s Elephant-in-the Room: Where’s the Money?

A CROs Accountability & Financial Impact Pulse Survey.

By Dirk Olin and Jay Whitehead

It is true that CEOs and CROs are the chief custodians of core values for corporate stakeholders—including investors, employees, customers, supply chains, customers, creditors, and government. But among executives who fill a dozen key line management roles, two elephant-in-the-room questions loom large in corporate responsibility. First, who is most accountable for, and commits company resources (read: money and people) to, implement the policies? And second, at the line management level, what are corporate responsibility’s non-financial and financial impacts?

Steering Through Stormy Seas

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel famously declared, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Although the recession appears to be ending as we approach Q4 of 2009, many corporations are still confronting market environments that threaten their core values. In the recently published 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis, Harvard Business School Professor Bill George—former CEO of Medtronic and best-selling author of Finding Your True North—contends that the economic calamity of 2008-09 was ultimately caused by a failure of corporate leadaership. Interested in positive lessons to counterbalance those failings, CRO magazine presents this exclusive excerpt from George’s impressive work to help guide our readers through whatever maelstroms they might confront—now or in the future.

—Dirk Olin