Recent Articles from Taylor Simonton
How to obtain your first corporate board seat
Your first corporate board seat is the hardest to find. A well thought-out personal action plan is your best path to obtain a position.
Hot tips for emerging company boards
Emerging companies comprise a significant portion of Colorado businesses. Venture capitalists, angel investors and founders make up the shareholders and the boards of directors of many of these companies. I spoke recently to Fran Wheeler, a partner in the Business Department of the Colorado Office...
Six concerns for company boards
Though it may be proxy season and time to plan for company annual meetings, executives and directors need to reassess their priorities by taking a fresh look at a number of new, critical concerns that are on the rise in the business world. In 2015, these top-of-mind issues must be considered by every company board: […]
Is your company ready for an activist attack?
A consistent, fully functioning, board of directors helps avoid activist challenges. Further, involved oversight by your nomination/governance committee is essential to counter the presentation of a short slate of director replacements from activists. A target company is presumptive if it believes...
The annual strategy review isn’t enough
As 2014 winds down, corporate directors will soon sit down in their boardrooms, as they do every year about this time, to focus on what is perhaps their most important function and primary responsibility: establishing and evaluating their companies’ overall strategic direction. The traditional str...
Big Data and the boardroom
Businesses today now collect billions of additional pieces of digital information on customers, processes, products, competitors and employees. Very few of these bits and bytes of information are significant on their own. But, if compiled in totality and analyzed with today’s powerful computing pl...
So, you want to be a public company director?
You have just been asked to join a public company board. How do you make sure you are not joining the next Enron or a board rife with dysfunction a la Hewlett-Packard? I spoke with Doug Wright, corporate, securities and M&A partner at the Faegre Baker Daniels law firm, following a recent Colorado Chapter of […]
Top 10 keys to corporate talent development
Boards know that having the right team of executives is critical to a successful strategy; however, the talent pool of executives, who can help accomplish those goals, is declining for the first time in decades. At the same time, in many industries, more than half of a company’s expenses now relat...
Top 13 LinkedIn tips for corporate directors (or wannabes)
Sitting or aspiring corporate directors who want to elevate their careers need to be findable. Most professionals accomplish this by achieving excellence in their careers and using the personal connections and professional networks that they built over many years. More recently, LinkedIn has becom...
Personal planning for corporate directors
Our program at a recent meeting of the Colorado chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD-Colorado) focused on issues that directly affect the lives and finances of independent corporate directors. These include tax planning, due diligence, liability protection, personal brand building, resume tips, legal issues and networking. (Watch a video of our entire […]
Is your board addressing diversity?
As major socio-economic and market forces change the way American companies operate, corporate boards face a new set of challenges. Global markets are expanding; however, international competition is growing as new customers emerge and demographics shift both at home and abroad. Corporate directors must address these challenges to ensure the future success of their companies. […]
Bracing for Obamacare
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, is the law, and businesses must brace for full implementation in a matter of months. Depending on your company’s size and infrastructure, Obamacare could be a train wreck, smooth-sailing or anything in between. Officers and directors of every organization, large or small, public or private, should […]