Thursday’s second morning session focused on the changing corporate environment in America and included advice to corporate officer’s and directors regarding how to adapt to this changing environment.

Moderator:

Jack Flug, JD, Managing Director, Marsh USA (New York, NY)

Panelists:

• Charles M. Elson, Esq., Professor, Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance (Newark, DE)
• Peter Gillon, Esq., Partner, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, LLP (Washington, DC)
• Richard S. Levick, Esq., President and CEO, Levick Strategic Communications (Washington, DC)

The moderator and panel discussed how corporate boards need to demonstrate leadership in today’s environment and employ new and creative methods to attack problem situations. Specifically, the panel discussed:

• Boards need to be accountable to those that they lead.  The panel referenced Airline Pilot Chesley Sullenberger as an example of an individual who demonstrated a selfless sense of responsibility to those in his charge.
• Boards need to utilize the internet and technology to aggressively defend their companies and products.  The panel discussed the existence of high level blogs and the fact that when a corporate crisis occurs (i.e. peanut scare, pet food scare, beef recall), the plaintiff’s bar has typically responded within one hour.  Corporations need to become similarly nimble.
• Boards need to be aware of the changing nature of mass communication and the media.  By many accounts, newspapers as we know them will soon cease to be published.  Therefore, daily media communications will, going forward, be almost exclusively electronic.
• The panel noted that one state Attorney General’s office employs a communications director whose job is to keep a daily list of cases in the news.  Boards need to do the same and perhaps recognize that the individual managers in place may not be the best people to change the existing corporate communications environment.