Good morning.
I wrote Monday that the job of a CEO is becoming increasingly difficult. If that’s true for CEOs, then it must be even more true for boards. They are the ones ultimately responsible for succession plans, and they must clean up the mess when those plans fail. They are also responsible for the company’s connection with a widening array of stakeholders. And they are expected to be up to speed on an ever-larger array of issues, from cyber security to geopolitics to the mind-spinning consequences of A.I. Who can possibly do such a job well?
In an effort to answer that question, Fortune has conspired with our partner Diligent to bring you the second annual list of The Modern Board 25. This isn’t as easy as calculating, say, the Fortune 500, which is based on a clear set of public data about a company’s revenues. Instead, we have relied on proxy data, which looks at the experience and independence of directors, their diversity, their longevity, their financial performance and their exposure to activists. The ranking also takes into account how the company has performed on a variety of ESG metrics, using data from Refinitiv. The result is a work in progress, but we think it provides an important new metric for measuring how boards are responding to the demands of the modern world.
So who passes this grade? Well, you’ll find this year’s list contains some well-known companies—like Walgreens (No. 10), Citigroup (No. 12), Amazon (No. 17) and Microsoft (No. 21). It also contains some companies you probably have never heard of, like No. 1 on the list—F5 Inc., a Seattle-based cyber security and application delivery firm. But we think this is the beginning of an important effort. Great companies need great boards, and The Modern Board 25 is designed to identify and nurture them. Let us know what you think.
You can read more about the list here. Other news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
