Chairman
Categories: Board of Directors, Company Management, Regulations
Shouldn't this be chairperson nowadays? Are there animal rights activists around here as well? ChairMammal maybe? Chairbot? You know that day's coming...
You know you’ve made it to the big time when you’re elected as chairman of a board of directors. All public companies have to have a board, and most private companies and non-profits have them as well. A board of directors advises the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) on strategy and the general direction the company should take. They carefully analyze the company’s financial results and can even override a decision made by the CEO. The chairman of the board presides over meetings and tries to get everyone to come to an agreement on controversial issues. The chairman also helps to select new board members when someone’s term is up (usually around six years).
As more and more women become the heads of boards, there appears to be a need for a different title (this reached something of a cultural head when Janet Yellen became the first woman to be chair of the Federal Reserve). Some go by “chair” or “chairperson” or even “madam chairperson.”
There have been many public battles between CEOs and Chairmen of the Board, and boards do have the power to fire a CEO. One of the most famous firings by a board happened when Steve Jobs of Apple was fired at the request of CEO John Sculley. And we all know what happened after that...by 1996, Apple fired Sculley and bought the company Jobs had started, NeXT, making him the new CEO. By 2018, Apple became the first company in the world to be valued at $1 trillion.
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Finance: What are CEOs, CFOs, and COOs?41 Views
Finance a la shmoop... what are CEOs, CFOs and COOs lots of C's you know sort of
like most of our high school report cards but it's a different story [Girl given a school report card with list of C grades]
all right so the C here for all of these stands for chief not the C in
big cheese and the O here for all of these stands for officer...
But sort of in that vein cop ish like when you are one of these
officers it's your watch your beat your patrol and all that the delimiter here
is the middle letter so let's start at the top there E the E in CEO stands for
executive and distinctively the CEO is hired by the board of directors who in
turn is elected by the common shareholders the CEO is in charge of and [Woman CEO standing in her office]
well pretty much everything basically executing on the mandate which is to
make money over the long term for shareholders the CEO deals with both
internal operational and financial issues as well as dealing directly with
shareholders externally you know on the outside people ie those Wall Street folk [People working in Wall Street]
and she is generally you know where the buck stop...okay
moving on and that'll make some nice venison....Okay the CFO is
hired by the CEO and while on bad days the F might stand for something else
on a normal day the F stands for financial, the chief financial officer
deals with the dollar numbers the bean-counting [CFO counting beans]
from hiring and paying people usually via the head of human resources hired by
the CFO to tracking profitability of divisions which the CFO usually does in
concert with others in the company to you know dealing with Wall Street people [CFO holding a chicken wing]
as the wing man to the CEO at rubber chicken lunches
well if the company is
gonna raise debt to go buy a competitor or sell equity from insiders in a
secondary offering or use stock to acquire a tools company which will let
it operate more efficiently well all of that goes through the CFOs highly [A cluttered desk of beans]
cluttered desk all right so moving on then there's the COO and if you say
it all together it sounds like a bird but it's not the middle O there stands
for operating well other than in a company which just does surgery all day [a heart monitor in a surgery room]
the operating officer doesn't actually do surgery rather she operates the
company and usually that involves asking a thousand questions hopefully not all
at once like that Fed Ex guy who had too much caffeine are we getting the best
prices on the raw plastic we're ordering from war-torn New Zealand, are we making
enough selfie helmets, and is your dad still disappointed with you for getting
a C in accounting 101 back in high school
mm-hmm? just keeping it real there pal... well we can't answer the first two
and as for the last one well you're a COO oh you can probably afford a nice
shrink now so go work out your issues [COO laying on sofa talking with psychiatrist]