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"The board" isn't exactly a single entity. Even if the current board made this decision unanimously, they were a minority at the beginning of the year.


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I'm pretty sure the last point about the makeup of the board is quite common, its often random people who are former or current executive of similar companies. In this case 3 members recently quit leading to the current majority.

The board, like any, is a small group of people, and in this case a small group of people divided into two sides defined by conflicting ideological perspectives. In this case, I imagine the board members have much broader and longer-term perspectives and considerations factoring into their decision making than the significant, significant majority of other companies/boards. Generalizing doesn’t seem particularly helpful.

Well, I would have thought the reason for having a board with more than one director is to ensure some diversity of opinion.

Who is on the board?

Could that not change as the board changes?

Its board members vs everyone else

The issue is that the old board has to agree to the new board.

Would that help much when it's the same board that elects new members to itself?

Unless they had a majority, that is not true. Having 1 or 2 workers on the board would be a good thing, I believe. Too many boards are out of touch with what goes on in the company.

They aren't as powerful as you think- it's not like they get a huge say in how things are run. If the board was a reorg they have the power to put the people in place to make it happen, regardless of what some random Director or VP has to say about it.

I think the board is required to be a majority non-equity-holders precisely because an equity-holding board will not keep to their non-profit mission.

Well not quite, the board doesn’t have a couple of unqualified independent directors any longer.

You're talking about the senior executive team, which may overlap with the board but it's not 1-1.

Board can't make that decision if the CEO has majority voting rights.

Don't the company's owners control who is on the board?

You do realize that 8 of the 14 board members were only here since 2010, right?

So they've pretty much reshaped the board in the past year or so already... I'm not sure a 2nd "reboot/reshuffle" will do much.


Wasn't that a proposal to increase view point diversity? My understanding was that they wanted more conservative board seats. That's different from the diversity this article discusses.

It's probably simple reporting logic. Having a board member reporting to someone not on the board would be problematic.

Yeah that's what I disagree with. And its not about board members only - rank and file employees regularly get fired for expressing opinions not endorsed by their orgs.
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