2019 Directors’ Alert
Taking the long-term view
Boards are uniquely positioned to oversee the long-term vision of an organization. Yet, many boards and executive teams are often tempted to focus on the short term. How can boards inject long-term thinking into their oversight role?
Hear from Deloitte business leaders and non-executive directors on how boards can apply a long-term lens to their oversight role in an age of disruption and uncertainty.
Deloitte's 10th edition of Directors' Alert covers the following topics:
- Recognizing how industry 4.0 will impact the long term
- Identifying how organizations can better engage with investors – and activists
- Understanding how organizations can re-imagine their ESG impacts
- Navigating tax strategy in a digital and complex world
Long-termism begins with the board. Prepare your board for the future, today.
Please visit the Global Center for Corporate Governance website for additional publications.
Explore this year's emerging topics for boards
engagement and activism
Social and Governance (ESG)
Long-term value creation:
Understanding the fourth industrial revolution
The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) is being driven by digital and cognitive technologies, and combinations of those technologies with physical processes and objects. Although business leaders need to distinguish between the hype and the real opportunities surrounding these technologies, it is as big a mistake to dismiss them as it is to mindlessly embrace them. Organizations are presented with these challenges as competitors seek to change not only the playing field, but the game itself. Both boards and management teams have work to do to ready their organizations for Industry 4.0.
Investor engagement and activist shareholder strategies:
What the board needs to know and do for the long term
Shareholders and activists have asserted themselves more in recent years. For better or worse, activists are more numerous and more diverse than they were in the past, both in their agendas and their methods. This reinforces the need for management, with the board’s oversight and guidance, to engage with shareholders proactively, to be prepared for friendly or confrontational activists, and to have a long-term plan for shareholder engagement.
The board and ESG:
Going long on the future of the enterprise
Discussions of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) matters have intensified in recent years. As overseers of risk and stewards of long-term enterprise value, board members have a vital oversight role in the organization’s environmental, social, and governance impacts. Leadership teams face ample opportunity to leverage ESG for the long-term good of the organization, its stakeholders, and society. With such high stakes, this is an area that organizations, and their boards, cannot afford to get wrong.
Tax strategy for the long term:
Is your organization getting it right?
Once considered just another part—and cost—of doing business, tax has become a high-priority agenda item for both the C-suite and the board. Tax strategy and its related technology, administrative, and risk management infrastructure must now be reviewed more frequently, in greater detail, and at higher levels of the organization than in the past. Considering the long-term impact that tax strategies and policies can have on an organization, proactive engagement by the board is clearly warranted.
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