> It is a problem that she is both on the board and CEO, which effectively makes her impossible to hold to account
Is this really a problem? The CEO is often a director, and even as chairwoman I doubt anything in the bylaws prevents the board at large from removing her if they wanted to.
Instead, it seems like the board itself is the issue, since they allowed Mozilla to stray so far from its core mission.
Is that common in the US? Because here in Sweden it is regarded as bad practice for medium sized companies and up. The CEO is almost never part of the board here except for in tiny companies.
I served on the board of the Apache Software Foundation for a year and everything about the experience convinced me that it is desirable for the board to be completely separate from the corporate officers.
In fact, I have seen this very debate play out in real life. We appointed a new President of the ASF during my term. That person had been a Director, but when they became President they stepped down from the Board.
For a non-profit charity that relies on volunteers, perfect separation is not always feasible, and especially in the early years when the ASF was smaller the President was often a Board member. But although I can't speak for anybody but myself, I believe that the ASF is likely to continue with an informal tradition of separating Board from Officers for the indefinite future.
A similar cultural change ought to be possible at Mozilla — and perhaps elsewhere.
Yes, having one or more executive directors is standard operating procedure for public companies in the US. Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, et al sit on their respective boards.
Indian here. Extremely common for the CEO to be part of the board. In fact the CEO equivalent "Executive head of company" designation in India before globalization made use of CEO fashionable was 'Managing Director'.
Yeah I remember that. While growing up in 90's and even early 2000's, I always heard praises of someone reaching post of MD. The term CEO became common later.
There are still plenty of MDs in the world, but these days it's mostly used in finance and consulting to represent the first layer of leadership below the c-suite.
It can vary, though; e.g. Kevin Sneader is the de facto CEO of McKinsey, but his official title is Global Managing Partner and his predecessor used Managing Director.
Definitely the normal thing in the UK for companies of all sizes for the CEO to be an executive director and therefore to sit on the board of directors.
It's so common here that I never even considered the possibility of having a CEO who wasn't also a member of the board. It's pretty common for them to also be chairman of the board. Especially for founder CEOs.
This one went nearly 3 years before it had a problem, but as soon as one key started acting up the rest of the row quickly followed. I'll trade up for the latest model (with the touch bar, which I actually like, and physical escape key) the next time I can afford to be unproductive for a couple days.
They're all identical keyboards -- AFAIK, literally -- so if you like it on one (or don't like it on one!), it'll apply to the rest. I have a 2020 MacBook Air and think it's one of the best laptop keyboards I've used in a long time. (And it makes me really hate going back to the butterfly keyboard on my work laptop, even though I found it okay to type on previously. I actually never had any dead keys on it, or on a previous work laptop with butterfly keys, or on a personal MBP 13" that the Air replaced.)
Is this really a problem? The CEO is often a director, and even as chairwoman I doubt anything in the bylaws prevents the board at large from removing her if they wanted to.
Instead, it seems like the board itself is the issue, since they allowed Mozilla to stray so far from its core mission.