Many a valuable corporate reputation has been built in part by key executives providing hands-on leadership to support nonprofit organizations and charity service providers. In the Sarbanes-Oxley world of transparent governance, however, nonprofits around the country have an increasingly hard time convincing top business leaders to join their boards.
Back in 2002, a Booz Allen Hamilton study found a backlog of 1.2 million vacant nonprofit board positions. Nonprofit directors tell me the situation is even worse today, as equally demanding accountability requirements create added responsibilities and liability for their board members.
At a Denver Leadership Exchange event in Dallas, Perot Systems Corp. CEO Ross Perot, Jr. said the time-intensive pressure of running a public company under Sarbanes-Oxley has become a “fact of life” that deters even altruistic chief executives. “A CEO doesn’t get bonus points for serving on the board of a community group,” he said.
So how to get the best and brightest chief executives involved in complex local concerns like education, economic development, affordable housing, public health and other issues? In Dallas, Perot used his considerable clout to create an “informal” group of CEOs who came together for business and social networking.
Once they all got to know each other, Perot said, then potentially beneficial civic projects were introduced to the group. The inevitable result was an injection of leadership, brainpower and money to facilitate development and new initiatives.
