TheCorporateCounsel.net

A fun project that often accompanies board meeting preparation is “benchmarking.” This used to mean combing through peer SEC filings to find information from other companies on whatever specific data point your boss or the board had inquired about. If you were lucky, secondary commentary would exist and give you a starting point. Good news! While peer disclosures & trend summaries absolutely remain valuable as sources for context and analysis, there are new tools these days to add to your toolbox.

Here’s a handy dashboard from The Conference Board, ESGAUGE, and Heidrick & Struggles that is updated weekly with info on CEO succession announcements in the Russell 3000 and S&P 500. I’ve also recently been using these dashboards to track trends on compensation, board practices, shareholder proposals, and ESG. You can filter by index, company size, and business sector – and browse data about:

1. Succession Rates – generally, across performance quartiles, across age groups, and share of forced successions

2. CEO Profile – various demographic categories and tenure

3. Departing CEOs – similar demographic categories, tenure, reasons for departure, and number of forced CEO departures (and why)

4. Incoming CEOs – demographics

5. Placement Types & Other Practices – inside appointments, non-executive directors appointed as CEOs, interim CEOs, practices for announcement & effectiveness dates, outside hires, and more

Happy benchmarking, everyone.

– Liz Dunshee