Lila MacLellan

Southwest Airlines’ holiday week from hell may cost the company up to $700 million. Here’s what boards can learn from the fiasco

Last week, Southwest Airlines gave hundreds of thousands of customers a holiday experience they won’t soon forget. Starting Dec. 22, the company canceled more than 15,000 flights as it tried to recover from a winter storm, leaving thousands of people…

Recession threats may complicate the 2023 board agenda, but directors should caution against hasty layoffs

We’ve reached that time when board members begin to peer ahead—sometimes with trepidation—to the coming year. KPMG and NACD released detailed outlook reports for corporate governance in 2023. The upshot for board members is this: Expect to deal with…

The threat of a recession, talent shortages, and geopolitical tension are among the many challenges corporate boards must navigate in 2023

As the year comes to a close, it’s only human to hope for a less volatile 2023. Alas, for corporate directors, the forecast calls for complexity and heaps of uncertainty. Boards should expect to deal with more of the same issues that tested their…

A director of 3 multi-billion dollar companies explains how—and why—she joined her first board: ‘I wanted to speak truth to power’

When Daphne Jones was a high school student in Dolton, Ill., in the mid-1970s, her guidance counselor told her to put college out of her mind. He implied that Black girls didn’t get degrees, Jones recalls in her book, Win When They Say You Won’t:…

Meta, Microsoft, and Accenture are pouring millions into the metaverse workplace. Here’s what employers should know before creating their CEO’s avatar

If you’re like me—and millions of others who live within commuting distance of their desk jobs—one of your first waking thoughts on weekdays is a deceptively simple question: “Should I go in?” The eternal query leads to more questions about the…

With Bret Taylor’s departure from Salesforce, just 7 companies in the Fortune 500 have a co-CEO

Bret Taylor, perhaps best known as Twitter’s board chair before Elon Musk took that company private, surprised everyone when he resigned from his day job as co-CEO of Salesforce this week. His departure raised questions, once again, about the wisdom…

Bret Taylor’s surprise exit from Salesforce isn’t proof the co-CEO model doesn’t work. But it requires the right conditions

Bret Taylor’s resignation as co-CEO of Salesforce surprised those inside and outside the company on Wednesday. Taylor shared the top position with the cloud-software maker’s founder Marc Benioff for one year, quickly moving up the ranks in his six…

Find me on LinkedIn: How Twitter’s upheaval and a looming recession could prove fruitful for the professional network

When Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter acquisition closed in late October, the Canadian researcher Alex Haagaard tweeted a proposal, forgoing punctuation the way people do on the platform: “Since we’re all talking about leaving Twitter again can I…

Billionaire investor Ray Dalio says most people aren’t as open-minded as they think, which leads to poor decision-making

People have blind spots, areas that prevent them from seeing things optimally, says Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates. And while that may seem obvious, hearing it from the billionaire who started one of the world’s largest hedge funds,…

Investor Chamath Palihapitiya once advised Sam Bankman-Fried to form a board. FTX’s response? ‘Go f—k yourself’

Not everyone bought into the FTX story. On the All-In podcast this week, investor Chamath Palihapitiya said he had doubts about FTX, the once high-flying crypto exchange, and its 30-year-old CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the Bahamas-based…

Fortune 500 board members share how they’re mapping scenario plans for a recession, market volatility, and global shocks

What will the future look like? And what are the best companies doing to prepare for it? Pamela Craig, who sits on the board of directors for Progressive, Corning, Merck, and 3M, wrapped up a panel at a leadership roundtable in New York last month…

A director at a $430 million retailer reveals how she landed a board job at a public company

Lili Gil Valletta is a board member for Zumiez, a retailer specializing in brands for skateboarders and sporty types, and the kind of teens who wear “Virginity Rocks” t-shirts, ironically or not. Valletta joined that board in 2019, though she didn’t…

More than 90% of S&P 500 boards disclose racial representation. But the numbers have barely budged

About 93% of S&P 500 companies disclose their racial and ethnic makeup, up from 60% last year, according to a Spencer Stuart Board Index report published Tuesday. The increase may not be that surprising considering the growing share of stakeholders…

The pandemic killed watercooler moments. Apple, Netflix, and Uber’s watercooler company came back stronger than ever

The rise of the remote-friendly workplace has chief executives sweating over watercooler moments, the proverbial “casual collisions” between workers that are said to inspire creativity and collaboration. Believe what you will about whether these…

Companies like Apple often invoke the spirit of their late founders—done wrong, this habit can come back to haunt them

We’re days away from Halloween—when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is said to be thinnest. It may also be the ideal time to determine whether corporate phantoms are haunting your boardroom. Allow me to explain. In recent…

If you’re a board director at two competing companies, the DOJ might soon be coming for you

The U.S. Department of Justice has again signaled its willingness to hold corporate boards accountable for breaking the law. On Wednesday, it announced that seven directors at five companies resigned after the DOJ raised concerns about antitrust…

An exclusive cohort controls one-third of all Fortune 500 board seats. Here’s why that’s a problem

That turned out to be a fool’s errand. “It quickly became evident that it doesn’t exist. There aren’t 100 diverse boards,” Namisha Bahl, chief marketing officer at Mogul, told Fortune. In fact, it could be decades before a top 100 ranking is…

The secret to becoming a more innovative board? Kindness, says billionaire entrepreneur Daniel Lubetzky

Daniel Lubetzky has strong opinions about the difference between being nice and being kind. But of course he does; he’s the founder of Kind, the famously “not-only-for-profit” snack company. He shared his definitions of both traits during a talk at…

4 areas of expertise every company needs on its board right now

Disney, McDonald’s, and GM appointed new board members this week for reasons that aren’t difficult to parse. GM, for instance, wants to outsell Tesla in the electric vehicle category by 2025; its newest director, Jon McNeill, is a former Tesla…

What America’s top CEOs are worried about as they look ahead to 2023

Last year, the word “recession” did not appear anywhere in KPMG’s U.S. CEO Outlook report, and “inflation” was mentioned only once. The 2022 report tells a completely different story. A majority of surveyed CEOs, 91%, anticipate a recession, with…