Investigation into Board Effectiveness of Top 100 Companies (Word DOCX)

Corporate governance policies of various top companies from their sectors were studied using their annual reports, corporate governance reports and other financial reports. The chosen companies where not only the industry leaders but were also chosen from different locations so that we can get an idea of how corporate governance policies differ from one country to the other.

The key learning from the exercise is that all of the companies place a lot of importance to their corporate governance activities and increasing effectiveness of the board and hence their high rankings. The two main factors that came out in evaluating board effectiveness is the value they create for their shareholders in terms of financial growth of the company and the return to shareholders on their investment and their integrity in the disclosure of the information. The disclosures made are affected by the regulatory mechanism of the country of operation.

As far as the board composition is concerned, all the top companies are in the range of 11 to 14 members. All of the companies have developed structures to evaluate the performance of their board at least once per year. While, all of the companies do have published corporate governance guidelines, very few of them actually publish corporate governance reports along with annual reports.