Scenario Planning or Watching the Watchers

Scenario Planning: Managing for the Future

Author: Gill Ringland

Scenario planning has received much top-level interest in the corporate sector as a way of realistically assessing the long-term future. Yet seldom are line managers included in initiatives, even though their exposure to customers and competitors means they often pick up subtle signals that are the first alert of changes to the operating environment. By exposing line managers to alternative scenarios, organizations can reduce the risk of ignoring the small environmental changes that are the advance warning for major discontinuities. Now completely updated in a new edition, the message of this practical, hands-on guide is that scenarios are not predictions or forecasts, but powerful weapons in managing the uncertainties of the future. Taking a conceptual rather than mathematical approach, it includes a wealth of case studies, checklists, early indicators and examples.

Interesting textbook: Simply Scones or Candle Cafe Cookbook

Watching the Watchers: Corporate Goverance for the 21st Century

Author: Robert Monks

No aspect of business or finance has changed more dramatically over the past decade than corporate governance. Until recently it has been unthinkable for a shareholder resolution to be sponsored by an institutional investor, or for a resolution sponsored by an individual investor to get more than 3 per cent of the vote. Suddenly institutional investors are submitting dozens of shareholder resolutions, all with substantial support. Astonishingly, shareholders have been reponsible for the departures of CEOs from the giants of Corporate America - General Motors, weestinghouse, IBM and Kodak.

Library Journal

Well-known activists in the area of shareholder rights, Monks and Minow (Power and Accountability, HarperBusiness, 1991) are particularly effective here in explaining the rapid changes in corporations over the past decade and why shareholders need to take a more active role in their corporation's governance. The authors describe and clarify the different roles of board members, management, and shareholders and explore how each should interact with the other. Both informative and persuasive, they provide numerous cases to support their arguments. Recommended for larger business and public affairs collections.Robert Logsdon, Indiana State Univ. Lib., Indianapolis

BookList

The authors have already made names for themselves as shareholder activists, and they take up here where they left off with "Power and Accountability" (1991). Overlooking responsibility to society and employees, they state that "the goal of corporate governance is to find a way to maximize wealth creation over time." After looking at the various definitions of what a corporation is, they analyze how the roles of shareholders (owners), directors (monitors), and managers (doers) combine to fulfill that goal. Monks and Minow are partners in an investment management firm and argue that pension fund investments have created a new kind of shareholder that is particularly suited to push companies to perform better. They also contrast corporate governance practices in several other countries. Numerous examples illustrate the authors' arguments, but are supplied scattershot.

Table of Contents:

	List of cases in point
	Foreword
	Acknowledgements
	Introduction
1	What Is a Corporation	1
2	Shareholders: Ownership	75
3	Directors: Monitoring	167
4	Management: Performance	225
5	Re-empowering the Shareholders: A Proposed Agenda for Action	261
6	Re-empowering the Board: A Proposed Agenda for Action	289
7	International Governance	309
	Index	331