The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:57:55 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.11 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png The 2022 Boardroom Agenda – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 The 2022 Boardroom Agenda https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2022/02/01/the-2022-boardroom-agenda/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-2022-boardroom-agenda https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2022/02/01/the-2022-boardroom-agenda/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2022 14:02:08 +0000 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=142935?d=20220201125638EST Posted by Robert Lamm and Carey Oven, Deloitte LLP, on Tuesday, February 1, 2022
Editor's Note:

Robert Lamm is an independent senior advisor at the Center for Board Effectiveness and Carey Oven is national managing partner at the Center for Board Effectiveness and chief talent officer of Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory and Deloitte & Touche LLP. This post is based on a Deloitte memorandum by Mr. Lamm, Mr. Oven, Maureen Bujno, Krista Parsons, Caroline Schoenecker, and Audrey Hitchings. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance includes The Illusory Promise of Stakeholder Governance (discussed on the Forum here) and Will Corporations Deliver Value to All Stakeholders?, both by Lucian A. Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita; For Whom Corporate Leaders Bargain by Lucian A. Bebchuk, Kobi Kastiel, and Roberto Tallarita (discussed on the Forum here); and Restoration: The Role Stakeholder Governance Must Play in Recreating a Fair and Sustainable American Economy—A Reply to Professor Rock by Leo E. Strine, Jr. (discussed on the Forum here).

The role of the corporation and the board in an ever-changing world

The saying “the more things change, the more they stay the same” has been around for a long time, but events of the past few years suggest that it may no longer be true. Those events have stress tested the status quo to a remarkable degree: We have experienced and continue to experience wave after wave of a global pandemic, domestic and global political and geopolitical uncertainty, the increasingly menacing existential threat of climate change, and demands for racial and political justice—to name just a few.

From the perspective of business, these developments have been accompanied by another challenge to the status quo—the increasingly widespread belief that corporations cannot and should not ignore the world around them, but rather should be engaged members of society and act to address the challenges we face.

For example, the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer reported that “sixty-one percent of respondents expect CEOs to fill the void left by government in fixing societal problems, while 65 percent feel CEOs should be as accountable to the public as they are to their shareholders.” [1]

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