Corporate Governance

Course Information

Registration Information

Meeting Times

Day Time Location
THU 3:30 - 6:30 pm GSB 3.138

Description

Senior executives - CEO's and their business unit, functional and regional direct reports - must consistently balance their time between achieving quarterly performance targets and building strong companies that can sustain above market financial performance in the future. As the business environment grows more complex, senior executives have to simultaneously manage business and political relationships, initiate and integrate acquisitions, create/change corporate culture, continually align the organization structure to the business strategy, deal with issues of corporate governance and succession planning, and learn to navigate through potential PR disasters. In addition, regardless of the size of a company, the senior management team must continually grapple with the question of how to allocate resources to competing programs and disciplines in support of the corporate strategy. This course will examine the roles and responsibilities of corporate leadership in a wide variety of settings - large and small companies, startups and established century old companies, global and single country/region companies - as all companies face slightly different versions of the issues discussed above. The normal format of the class will be to invite one or more guest speakers to address the students for the first half of the class period. The guests will be encouraged to provide ample opportunity for questions during their presentations. The second half of the class will focus on in-class discussion of assigned reading material. The individuals that will be invited to class will include senior executives from major corporations and entrepreneurs, elected officials, corporate lawyers and venture capitalists. The following is a partial list of individuals who regularly speak to the class: Charles Matthews-General Counsel at Exxon, James Moroney-Publisher of Dallas Morning News, Scott Halliday-Managing Partner of Ernst & Young, Kenneth Jastrow- Chairman of Temple-Inland Financial Corporation, Laura Wright-CFO of Southwest Airlines, Mark Sutton-Chairman and CEO of Americas UBS, Herb Kelleher-Chairman of Southwest Airlines, Tom Hicks-Chairman of Hicks Holdings, Tom Craddick- Speaker of the Texas House, Bob Boldt-CEO of UTIMCO, Jeff Hunt-CEO of GCI Read Poland, Tom Meredith-CEO of MFI Capital, and Bernard Rapoport-Founder of American Income. Students' performance will be evaluated based on a combination of in-class participation and a term paper.