Archive for September, 2020
Board Spear Carriers: Protecting the CEO’s Line of Credit
Over the course of my 30-plus years of work with public transit boards and their CEOs, I’ve learned that executives aspiring to take the helm of a transit authority are often woefully ill-prepared to build the kind of partnership with their new board that is critical to their success and to their longevity at the top. Dave Stackrow and I, in our new book Building a Solid Board-CEO Partnership (Governance Edge 2019), discuss two major reasons for this often-professionally fatal shortcoming: the absence of detailed, practical, experience-based courses on governance generally and board-CEO relationship building particularly in graduate schools of … Read the rest
Traveling the Road Less Traveled: a Conversation with Change Master Ben Limmer
In my book Leading Out-of-the-Box Change (Governance Edge, 2012), I call really significant, self-planned and self-managed innovation and change a “road less traveled,” observing that it “is not only extraordinarily difficult to accomplish, it’s also the distinct exception to the rule.” One of the most important potholes you can expect to encounter on this little-traveled road has disrupted many more than one change journey: the very natural and virtually inevitable human resistance to change. Indeed, my long experience working with nonprofit and public organizations has taught me that the psychological – often viscerally emotional – resistance to change tends to … Read the rest
Joanna Pinkerton and Emille Williams Discuss the CEO-COO Partnership at COTA
In the video interview I recorded with them a couple of weeks ago, Joanna Pinkerton, President/CEO of the Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA), and COTA’s Deputy CEO, Emille Williams, explain why COTA’s version of the classic chief executive officer-chief operating officer (CEO-COO) structure works so well for the transit authority of the second largest and fastest growing metropolitan area in the Midwest. Perhaps most importantly, Emille’s focus on internal operations makes it possible for Joanna to concentrate on her working relationship with the COTA Board, the formulation of long-run growth strategies, and COTA’s relationships with key stakeholder organizations in Greater … Read the rest
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