Commencement address

Address to the graduating class of 1959 by Ben W. Heineman, chairman of the Chicago and North Western Railway System

Are Institutional Investors Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?: Key Descriptive and Prescriptive Questions About Shareholders

Over the last twenty years, institutional investors have owned an increasing share of public equity markets — more than 70 percent of the largest 1,000 companies in the United States in 2009, for example. Over the past two years, in response to failures of some boards of directors and business leaders, shareholders, including institutional investors, have been given increased powers to participate in — or have disclosures about — discrete spheres of governance in publicly held corporations. Moreover, during this same period, and in multiple jurisdictions, there have been increasing calls from both the public and private sectors for institutional investors to play a broad “stewardship” role by “engaging” with investee companies to “help achieve long-term sustainable value” and to help curb excessive risk taking seen as a factor in the financial crisis. But with these shifts in market and legal powers have come questions about institutional investors which are similar to those raised in the recent past about the corporations in which they invest. These questions relate to goals, strategies, governance, performance and accountability and, importantly, the separation of ownership and control (agency problems). They boil down to a bedrock query: do investors have the capacity to perform the role now expected of them? Institutional investors in this paper include: pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, hedge funds and endowments of non-profit entities like universities and foundations

Enveloping Sophisticated Tools into Process-Centered Environments

We present a tool integration strategy based on enveloping pre-existing tools without source code modifications or recompilation, and without assuming an extension language, application programming interface, or any other special capabilities on the part of the tool. This Black Box enveloping (or wrapping) idea has existed for a long time, but was previously restricted to relatively simple tools. We describe the design and implementation of, and experimentation with, a new Black Box enveloping facility intended for sophisticated tools --- with particular concern for the emerging class of groupware applications

Poverty Amid Plenty, The American Paradox

155

High Performance with High Integrity

Mr. Heineman writes that although CEO’s may be tempted to “cut corners, fudge accounts or worse” in the quest to make the numbers, it is most important that CEO’s “create a culture of integrity through exemplary leadership, transparency, incentives (the concept of “doing well while doing good”) and processes. This book shows how everyone can “drive performance by integrating integrity systems and processes into a company’s operations.

High Performance with High Integrity

Mr. Heineman writes that although CEO’s may be tempted to “cut corners, fudge accounts or worse” in the quest to make the numbers, it is most important that CEO’s “create a culture of integrity through exemplary leadership, transparency, incentives (the concept of “doing well while doing good”) and processes. This book shows how everyone can “drive performance by integrating integrity systems and processes into a company’s operations.