The concentration of power in corporate boardrooms is one of those problems that everybody in business acknowledges and almost nobody does anything about.
The mechanics are well understood. When a CEO also chairs the board, board members nominated by that same CEO become reluctant to challenge the person who elevated them. Probing questions don’t get asked. Polished reports get accepted at face value. The board’s fundamental purpose—identifying problems before they become crises—quietly erodes.
None of this is new. It’s taught in business schools and cited in the preamble of every major corporate scandal after the fact. And that’s precisely what’s so dispiriting about it.
Whenever governance fails spectacularly enough to make headlines, a reliable sequence follows. Professors surface with op-eds. The financial press runs its accountability cycle. There’s a brief, serious-sounding conversation about reform, and then the moment passes and the structural problem remains exactly where it was.
The argument for separating the CEO and board chair roles has been made clearly and repeatedly for decades. It’s not a contested point. The resistance isn’t intellectual—it comes from powerful CEOs who need board members willing to make noise, but never quite enough of it. That’s a much easier arrangement to maintain than it should be.
The governance community keeps waiting for the next crisis to reopen the conversation. It always does. And then, just as reliably, it closes again without resolution.
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